


Say Yes to the Marquess

by DarkAthena (seraphim_grace)



Series: A/B/O bodice rippers [12]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Regency, Disabled Character, Lydia has a job, Marriage of Convenience, Married Couple, Multi, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Planned Pregnancy, Potty mouth parrot, Stiles rescues animals, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-22 21:50:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 33,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23734288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphim_grace/pseuds/DarkAthena
Summary: Since his return from war, the Marquess of Westfall’s to-do list has been short and anything but sweet: brooding, glowering, menacing London ne’er-do-wells accidentally by night. Now there’s a new item on the list. He needs an heir—which means he needs a wife. When Lydia Martin, a vicar’s daughter turned seamstress, appears in his library wearing a wedding gown, he decides on the spot that she’ll do.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Peter Hale/Lydia Martin
Series: A/B/O bodice rippers [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/261271
Comments: 228
Kudos: 357





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on "The Duchess Deal" by Tessa Dare but I preferred the title of her "Say Yes to the Marquess" which is a very funny book about a guy trying to convince the girl he loves to finally marry his brother who has left her on the shelf for eight years, involving the tropes of a modern marriage such as cake tastings, the gown, flowers etc.
> 
> The "Duchess Deal" I found more suitable for my purposes but I switched the title [I recommend both books] there are aspects here of "The Wallflower wager" as well] 
> 
> This Peter is scarred and it makes up a lot of his characterisation and the concept of women and omega being ruined is a massive plot point. So if description of scarring [huge plot point] or societal slut shaming isn't for you that's fine, there are ten or so other stories in this series which are better suited. 
> 
> As is normal for these fics there is NO sexual violence, no overt violence, no animal cruelty, no one dies, no scenes of horror just usually intelligent people miscommunicating for the drama, it will however feature explicit sexual scenes - often for comedic purposes; a demonic cat; a meddling household and Sterek living across the square with a foul mouthed parrot - so unusually there will be some foul language. Derek and Peter are not related. There is a single panic attack shown.
> 
> Also being a dressmaker myself I know exactly how long it takes to make a gown so no overnight make overs with clothes that previously didn't exist because that really annoys me

At the age of two and twenty Lydia Martin had learned many of the hard lessons that the world could teach. First and foremost of these was that there was no charming prince or handsome knight just in the distance waiting to rescue a damsel in distress, no matter how pretty, and most of the time there was nothing to do but gird her loins, take charge and solve the problem herself.

This afternoon was one of those situations.

Westfall House was an overcompensation of a townhouse. It was five stories of modern architecture with a white granite front, perfectly painted new door and sash windows that dared to have small, well-tended, window boxes full of spring pansies.

Even in this weather, a completely unseasonal downpour with a cold wind that caught around Lydia's ankles, the house looked like it belonged and reminded her that she didn't.

She reminded herself that this was not about belonging this was about the necessity of money in modern society and if she wanted to maintain her lodgings and actually pay her rent this month that this was what she needed to do.

She was an independent woman with her own work as a prized seamstress at _Dona_ Calaveras very exclusive modiste. She had walked to London in the worst snowstorm in a decade. She had managed her life and business for the past six years and almost never went to bed with an empty belly.

In comparison to those things knocking upon the door of a Marquess should be child's play. She had rehearsed it in her head, "Good afternoon, I am Miss Lydia Martin, I am here to see the mysterious, reclusive Marquess of Westfall, no, we aren't acquainted, no I do not have an appointment or a calling card. I won't have a home tomorrow if you don't let me."

She couldn't help but sigh at the sheer futility of it. They would turn her away at the door like they would any caller, but she had to try. She pushed the cloak away from her bare arms, unlatched the gate and stepped up towards the four stairs that led to the bright glossy red door suddenly deaf to the street for the roaring in her ears. It was getting late, soon they would shoo her off just for loitering in Knightsbridge, one of the premier addresses in the entire empire. She thought she was going to be sick. She had to do this. She just had to raise her hand and knock. It would only take a moment, she just had to raise her hand and knock. She could do this, she was Lydia Martin, she just had to raise her hand and knock.

\-----

Sitting in his library, at his escritoire with a lamp illuminating only the letter that he was working on, Peter Hale, Marquess of Westfall, heard a strange ringing sound that was so unfamiliar he questioned that he had heard it at all. He wasn't sure but he thought it might be the doorbell.

It couldn't be the doorbell. He hadn't been in London but a month and no one but the Blossom family knew and they would certainly not come calling. The advantages of everyone assuming that you were still on the continent was that no one rang your doorbell in what threatened to be a fearsome storm, enough that even here on the first floor he could hear the wind pick up around the chimney stacks four floors above.

Then it came again. 

It was a doorbell.

And worse than that - it was his doorbell.

It must have been the Blossoms. They would have told someone who told the Prattler and now all of London would know that he was back and they would expect things, like him attending their balls now that he was no longer engaged and could be engaged to their little darlings - well until they saw his face because there were things even a grand fortune and title couldn't wipe the disgust and apologies as they moved their darlings away from him.

_"How can I be expected to lie with that?"_

He turned his attention back to his letter to his solicitor, scratching idly at the velvet eyepatch with the embroidery catching on his bitten fingernails. _"I do not know why I expected that you might continue on with my business ventures as if I was present for it is clear that you have not and so I must tell you to fire the land manager on the estate in Yorkshire for he is beyond incompetent and might be embezzling. I will need someone able at complex mathematics to go over his books for I cannot make them add up. The manager of the mill in Lancashire takes too long to present his reports, light a fire under his ass so that I receive those reports monthly and not as and when he finds convenient. I will need full tallies of the cargoes of the three ships expected into London within twenty-four hours of their arrival. I must admit my disappointment that whilst fighting for King and Country on the continent I return to find my business interests a shambles run by incompetents and if competence is present it is in the form of a possible thief._

_Also, I need a wife."_

He paused for a moment wondering if he should add some corollary to that statement. He would need a wife of good standing; of childbearing age and good health who would be swayed by her finances into accepting his offer. He had no illusions of his appearance after the accident. He had been left a scarred husk of a man and if she was not desperate then she would have no reason to marry him.

_"How can I be expected to lie with that?"_

Kali, Peter's butler, a fine alpha woman from India who spoke with a slight accent and had a terrible beauty that many other alphas found more intimidating than her record as a soldier for the Raj, knocked and entered. "My lord," she said with an almost imperceptible bob of the head. She wore an Anarkali suit in a dark almost black blue and embroidered with flowers in a shimmering black thread over a plain pair of loose black pants. her feet, as always when she was in the house, were bare. She favoured heavy earbobs and a necklace of golden drops around a perfect neck and assured him that this was typical of a butler in India and he didn't know enough about the continent to contradict her. She wore her hair neatly tied back in a way that accentuated the perfect oval of her face. Despite her incredible beauty, she had never flinched at his scars.

_"How can I be expected to lie with that?"_

"There is a young woman at the door," she said in that supercilious way of hers, "and she appears to be wearing a wedding gown."

Peter looked at the letter he had written, then back to Kali, then back to the letter. Either his solicitors were much more capable than he had thought and had managed to actually presume, correctly, what it was he wanted, or this was an exquisite coincidence.

Knowing the capacity of his solicitors, who had probably never had an independent thought among them, it was the latter. He had gone to war with everything in place to run itself and come back to a shambles. He needed an heir or everything that he had achieved would go to his feckless idiot of a cousin who insisted on being given more of an allowance so he could spend it on beta prostitutes and horseflesh, the little that remained after that was spent on drink and if he inherited the estate not only would he drink himself to death within a year but the estate would be bankrupted and the people who relied on it would be cast out with no recourse.

He needed a woman, for he knew he could not aim for an omega even with his title, who would accept payment to marry him and provide him with a legal heir who would usurp the idiot cousin to the extent that Peter would have no compunction about cutting him off entirely.

Looking again at his letter and its fateful final line he muttered "well that's uncanny," and stood up moving to the couch, away from the only light source, as he told Kali "by all means, show her in."

Leaning forward to look for his tea his hand caught the cup, which he could barely see and almost sent it spiralling to the ground, he leaned forward to catch it, lost his place where he was almost sat, mostly perching, and careened forward and damn near brained himself on the coffee table, sending the pages of the correspondence he had left there flying.

He was blinded.

He wished that he could say that it was by her beauty - though he supposed she might be beautiful if she wasn't so bedraggled by the terrible weather but her gown was, even in the terrible light, an eye-gouging monstrosity of nacre, petal pink silk, lace, brilliants and beads.

It was the first time since Waterloo he had been in the same city as something even more hideous than he was. He put his hand up to his good eye, not to hide his scars as he might have in a well-lit room, but to shield himself from the glare. There was so much hideous lustre on the gown that it seemed to be its own light source. He had never seen its like and probably would not again. The cut was fashionable, perhaps a little low in the bosom and she had paired it with a neat fichu to preserve her modesty and a tidy black velvet belt to showcase her tiny waist, and the spring of the Brunswick style jacket over her hips. The dress was a horrendous mix of taupe covered with a pink net which gave it a similarity to a rotten peach, and every seam and expanse of fabric was covered in garish red brilliants, like tiny rubies, tube beads with a rainbow finish, strings of seed pearls and flakes of mother of pearl in a strangely asymmetric design which not only covered the jacket but the skirt. There was even a trim made of the taupe russet under gown in Canadian smocking where river pearls crowned every peak.

It wasn't a gown as much as an abomination that a pretty girl just happened to be wearing.

"Your grace," she started.

"My Lord," he corrected. It was a common mistake, and he was tired of correcting people. Dukes or bishops were "your grace" he was "my lord,"

"Oh no," she said, "I'm just Miss," she said it so quickly it took a moment for her to realise that it had been a correction and not an address. She had a lovely smile. She had the capacity to be a beauty, but she wore a plain linen cap and it was pressed to her hair by the rain - even with the heavy wool cloak she wore with the anathema of a gown. She looked like a pretty shopgirl who was wearing a dress designed for a colour-blind and tasteless matron of the ton. "I'm Miss Martin," she said with a small curtsey. "It's very dark in here, perhaps we could open the curtains?"

He wasn't sure which frightened him more - her seeing the wreckage of his face or him seeing the gown in full light.

"I'm sorry, my lord, I am at sixes and sevens, I have spent nearly an hour outside your door trying to pluck up the courage to call, and it has taken all that I am and am sorry for the imposition to your day."

"I should hope you are," Peter muttered under his breath.

She continued regardless of his interruption, "and I half hoped that you would not be present, you see, my lord, Peter Hale, Marquess of Westfall, you are my only hope."


	2. Chapter 2

It took Peter a moment to blink past the girl's statement that he was her only hope. He had never been even one hope for such a girl- unless they had read his name in DeBrett's and liked the look of his title to get them away from their mother. "I'm sorry," he said so that she would take the hint and tell him what it was she wanted from him.

From the pocket of her hideous gown, and it said something that they had one thing to recommend them that under the tight pleating were openings for pockets, she pulled a sheaf of neatly folded papers tied with a riband, which she offered out to him. "My lord," she said, "this dress was made for Vidama Blossom for the occasion of your marriage," Peter wondered what he was meant to do with that information, "whilst Vidama Blossom provided the fabric and the embellishments when the marriage was cancelled she abandoned the gown without paying for the labour. I have invoices here to explain the costs, but if the labour isn't paid then I am not paid and if I am not paid I cannot pay my rent which has come due. I wrote to both yourself and the vidama several times, as has _Dona_ Calaveras and we were ignored. So I thought if I showed up here wearing the gown then you would have to take me seriously enough that you would look at the invoices."

If the monstrosity had been made for Vidama Blossom it explained a lot. Vidama Blossom tended the extreme and wanting everyone to look at her and marvel at her, so it was not enough that she have a good gown she had to have the best gown with the most expensive silks and the dearest nets and the most trim imaginable. Peter had meant to marry the girl because she would have made a fantastic Marchioness, she was well acquainted with the _Haute ton_ , she had connections in society, she was beautiful and despite obviously having no taste whatsoever, she was clever. Her lack of taste had also included himself, he supposed.

Peter took the envelope, opening it and looking through the columns of numbers. Her accounting was impeccable, recording every hour she worked on the gown, including fittings, with extra charged for working in poor light to finish the gown on time, all of which was perfectly ordinary and expected. There was a lot of labour in the dress, and each technique used from stitching hidden stays to cartridge pleating was listed with a time taken and hourly rate charged. The labour cost in the monstrosity of a gown alone was £1 4 shillings and Peter had no idea if that was extortion or not. He did know that one vidama of his acquaintance had spent £150 on her court gown and that was considered a bargain, so the price was small in comparison. 

Miss Martin's accounting was superb and left him no question that anything had been overcharged, and it even included the surcharge expected to be paid to _Dona_ Calavera for the use of her shop space. "I think £2 should be reasonable," he said, "I can see that the work is fine and certainly worth a little extra." He opened a drawer in his escritoire and pulled out two pound notes which he put on the counter for her. "The dress might be unsuitable even for a bawdy house curtain but it is certainly very well made."

"Your intended had extravagant tastes," Miss Martin said with a dip of the head that told him she knew exactly how hideous the dress was but she was far too polite to say so, at least until she had pocketed the cash.

"I can't even take the whole thing in," Peter said leaning forward in his chair, there might have been a pattern in the lace, like a cornucopia but the beads were a different one and his eye just slid off the whole into the tight cartridge pleating at the waist which seemed more, well more than usual.

She gave a quiet sigh that baffled him, "you can't like it, it's like a whale vomited on you and no one removed it until it had hardened at which point someone chiselled in divots so you could move."

"It doesn't matter whether or not I like it, your grace, I take pride in my work and this gown represents over two hundred hours of my work. I spent months working on this gown and this gown alone."

This gave Peter a moment's pause, and he looked at her, critically for the first time. She was lovely, with soft red hair tucked under a linen cap which neatly covered her ears but a few wisps had escaped and the rain had caused to curl around her oval face. She had a wide pink mouth and expressive brown eyes with neat brows and a small nose. She had a delightful symmetry of features where the ends of her mouth matched the pupils of her eyes and her skin was pale. He wondered if she was a natural redhead, her hair was less brassy than Vidama Blossom's more aggressive dark red, and if it meant that she would have pale pink nipples on her full breasts, pressed to straining by the hideous gown.

She was lovely, even if the gown was an abomination that the Spanish Inquisition should have hunted down to burn at the stake.

"The embroidery alone was two weeks of work, my lord," she continued and Peter did a double-take, there was embroidery on the thing, lawd, he had not even noticed it. As she spoke she skimmed a white fingertip, neatly in a silk glove, along the neckline of the gown under the fichu that had been tugged open when she had opened her cloak, to the soft full breasts pressed against the fabric, as white as the silk of her gloves with a hint, just a hint, of pink. He enjoyed them much more than the gown.

He made a point of looking back to her face. He had not had a woman in his bed since before the accident and it had been a long year. His fingers itched to reach behind her head and untie the cap, to let her long red hair fall free of pins around her shoulders and that lovely swan neck of hers, and find the pins in her gown and pull them out, one by one by one.

It had been a long year.

He ascribed her prettiness to the long period between lovers. She was a seamstress employed by a prestigious modiste, she could not be that pretty. If she was some merchant with a keen eye would have snapped her up and set her in place as a trinket in his modest townhouse. 

"My lord," she continued, "my fire bin is empty, my rent is due and I have eaten nothing but hard cheese for days. My rent is due tomorrow, I need to collect my wages, most urgently." She wanted to move towards the money on the escritoire but she didn't want to get too close to him.

"Miss," he took the notes in his hand and waited for her to finish her name for him which she did, "you don't seem to understand how this intruding on a peer's solitude works. You should be intimidated, if not terrified, and yet you are treating me exactly as you would a costermonger whom you suspect of cheating you. How am I to be certain you are merely a seamstress and not a charlatan out to dupe me?"

She removed her gloves to show him her hands, covered with calluses, slight cuts, grazes and all of the other scars of her labour. The evidence was persuasive but he remained unconvinced.

"You were certainly not born to poverty, you hold yourself too well, you speak properly and your accounting is superb. You have all of your teeth, so none were sold to make rent or have rotted from gin. Were you orphaned at the end of your schooling?"

"No, my lord," she answered but her eyes were on the notes in his hand.

"Are you being blackmailed, perhaps?" 

"No, my lord,"

"Supporting a passel of abandoned children whilst being blackmailed?" Peter had to admit that this was the most fun he had had in weeks.

"No, my lord."

Peter snapped his fingers together and she flinched, "I have it, your father is a scapegrace in debtors prison?"

"No, my lord," she said, "my alpha parent, my mother, is a vicar, in Essex."

That caught Peter unawares. Vicars were gentlemen. Vicar's daughters didn't work for a living, they married gentlemen. "So how does a vicar's daughter find herself working her fingers to nubs on the ugliest dress in England?"

There was a flash of something in her eyes before it became anger. "Life is uncertain, my lord, sometimes it takes turns we cannot predict."

Peter laughed at that, "that's an understatement," he leaned on the escritoire with his elbow so that he could put his face in his hand and cover his scars. Scars she did not seem to flinch from although he knew the state of his face well enough to wonder why she did not. 

"I am sorry, the broken engagement must have been a blow and I am salt in the wound, for Vidama Blossom seemed a lovely young woman."

He stretched out his hand with the notes in it, "if you had spent more time in her company you would know that she was not."

"Then perhaps it is for the best that the marriage was called off."

"It was a stroke of luck that I destroyed my face before the wedding," he said flippantly, "what bad luck if I had done it afterwards."

"Is my lord given to hyperbole? Destroyed is surely an exaggeration."

Peter slammed the drawer that contained the lockbox shut as hard as he could, but it was so well made it didn't make a noise. "Vidama Blossom was desperate to marry an alpha with a title, any alpha, I am a Marquess with grand fortune. She still left me, it is that bad."

He stood up and turned so she could see all of his face in the light without any obstruction. He kept his escritoire in the most shadowy corner of a room he kept dark apart from a single shaded lamp angled so its light fell on his papers. He had heavy velvet drapes on each window so that no light came in this room, the mirrors were curtained and he made a point that nothing would reveal his face. The surgeons had done what they could, but he was under no illusion about what remained, but between the original accident and the weeks of fever and infection which followed, that he had been blessed to survive he knew he was a horror. From his crown to his hip the entire right side of his body was a mass of scar tissue, divots and vile pockets of unharmed skin to remind him just how bad the rest of it was. The only part of his right side that was fair to look on was the silk eyepatch that covered the empty socket.

Miss Martin said nothing. She didn't cry out or swoon. She didn't vomit or run away. It said much to her constitution. She didn't even break his gaze. "How did it happen?" she asked.

"War," he answered, "next question."

"May I have my money?" 

He had not realised that he had clenched his hand into a fist around the notes until he reached out for her to take them, which she went to without looking away from his face. At the last moment he took his hand, and the cash, back. "Once I have the gown," he said.

"Pardon?" she asked.

"I pay you for the work, it is fair that I get the gown that I have paid for."

"Why? I do not think it would fit without alteration which of course I could do, at an extra charge."

He liked her. "I haven't decided, I might use it as a net for my battledore tourneys."

"Then you would need to remove the skirts to stretch them across the room, which would, again, cost you extra."

She was delightful and so utterly bored with him he wanted nothing more than to needle her more. "I might just hang it over the front door to ward off evil spirits, it does not matter what i choose to do with the gown, there are simply so many choices."

"Then I shall have it delivered tomorrow," she said, "once the accounting is done in _Dona_ Calavera's books."

"Then that would be a loan, Miss Martin, not a payment for services rendered. I am not a usurer, I do not lend money."

"You want the gown now?"

"If you want the money now."

Her glare should have turned him to stone and it was such a surprise to the usual disgust and horror that he was enjoying himself immensely. He shrugged against her accusations of villainy and wanted to grin but it would pull on the scar tissue on his face which was an unpleasant experience and he was learning to avoid.

There was a particular circle of hell for those who were so severely disfigured by utter chance on the battlefield. There was no one to blame, no terrible enemy that he could rant and rail against, just a moment of bad fortune that could have happened to anyone, but had happened to him. He was bitter, how could he not be when he had lost so much, and it meant that he would lash out in rage at anything near, especially if he felt that they deserved it. He was coming to truly enjoy being a pain in the arse.

If he looked like a beast he certainly could act like one.

Miss Martin had no intention, however, of playing the mouse and quivering in the face of him. Not even his disfigurement had caused her to waver in place.

He liked her more for it. If she hadn't run from him in abject terror she likely would not.

He went to hand over the money when he realised she had shucked off her cape so it fell in a pool around her ankles and her hands, without her gloves which she had not replaced, were finding the pins that held the gown in place. One by one she removed the pins, sliding them into her fichu and the fabric of the bodice went slack. It was not enough to cause her breasts to spill out - even if he had wanted it to - she wore an old and yellowed set of stays that kept everything in place even as she showed him the edges of the tissue-thin fabric of her shift when she pulled down the bodice over her shoulder. A wisp of red hair fell over the pale curve of her shoulder and swept across her collarbone.

Jesus wept.

"Stop." He surprised himself that he said it.

"Stop?" she asked.

He cursed God, the angels and what saints that he could remember at that moment, "do not make me ask twice," he told her. "Stop."

Peter had not been prepared to say it once so saying it twice was a remarkable feat. He had been on the verge of her standing in her underthings for the price of two pounds, which was more expensive than it would have been in a bawdy house, but this girl was not a bawdy house whore - she was vicar's daughter.

He had always fancied the idea of debauching a vicar's daughter - there was a promise of repression and naivete and virginal purity that was entirely fictional, and he knew it, but the fantasy was delightful. Yet he was not so diabolical that he would do it just because he could when the girl was so obviously bored and extorted.

He had a thought, maybe, just maybe he could still exploit that fantasy, through means that were not so fiendish or wicked. He regarded Miss Martin from a fresh angle as she repinned her gown, thinking of that list of requirements that he had put in his letter.

She was young. She was healthy. She was educated. She came from a good family, and she was willing to take off a gown in front of him.

Most importantly - she was desperate.

She'd be perfect.

"I have an offer, Miss Martin," he said, "I can pay you the two pounds," he paused finally letting her take the notes from his hand, and watching as she shoved them into her pocket, "or I can make you a Marchioness."


	3. Chapter 3

"Beg pardon?" Lydia said to the outlandish offer that the Marquess had made her. It gave her an excuse to gawk so she did. He was a tall man with the active body shape of a Corinthian, and he wore doeskin pants with a double fly, and a shirt but had, being desirous of comfort other than fashion, not pulled on a vest or jacket, which made him look like an illustration from a scandalous novel. The scarring of his face was made worse by the perfection of his left side.

He had been a handsome man, with sharp blue eyes under thin brows with dark lashes pulled down at the side, a strong even nose and a wide but firm mouth. There was a cleft to his chin but his jaw was strong but not so wide that it became a detractor, he had high cheekbones but they weren't wide in a Nordic fashion and what skin remained was golden in the lamplight.

The right side of his face was ruined.

Scar tissue had melted the details of his skin and tugged up the corner of his mouth. A velvet patch covered his right eye, and it had been trimmed and made to look suitable for a Marquess and had little chips of hematite that shaped out a circle like an eye. The scarring continued down his neck and under the open collar of his linen shirt. He had more fabric in his shirt than she had in her shift despite it being tugged free of his pants and ending at his hips and hers reaching her knees.

What she could see of his chest was muscled, although scar tissue crept across the right pectoral and she could see the flat plane of his abdomen through the opening of his shirt.

On his right hand, he wore a black lace glove so the scarring continued that far down. The lace was handmade and covered each of his fingers and thumb. He wouldn't have had to make do with machine lace scratching away at his scarred skin.

Lydia wasn't scared by it, as striking and terrible as it was, but she was struck by it. She wanted to push back the shirt and see how far the scarring went, where it ended and was the skin that was untouched that same warm colour all the way down. Did his scarring end at his ribs, did it continue down to his hips, his thighs, his cock?

She was adult enough to recognise a frisson of desire but it was more the concept of virile alpha in front of her than the reality of the Marquess, not because of his scars but because he was a cock.

It was as if he were two parts and they had been crafted by different artists and glued together. Even his thick dark hair was pushed back on the right by scar tissue, but he crackled with energy and strength and vivacity, and he had a cruel twist to his smile but she didn't feel threatened. He wasn't wearing boots so if she ran he couldn't chase her into the cold wet cobbles of the Knightsbridge street.

"I said," he said with that smug little smirk on the left side of his mouth, "that I would make you my Marchioness."

Her mouth fell open. "You don't mean by marriage?" she was incredulous.

"Of course not," he said, "I intend to go to Brighton, bully the prince regent into creating a new peerage, finding the land, of course, waiving the laws of primogeniture to make sure no undeserving cousin can steal it and then appointing a vicar's daughter from Essex to it for no other reason than I would find it amusing, it might take a week or so." He was a master at sarcasm she noticed, "of course I mean by marriage, Miss Martin."

"Oh good," she said in an arch tone, "I wanted to make sure that you had lost your mind before I continued because you can't be asking me to marry you."

He sighed and sat back down into the shadows, "I am a Marquess," he said, "I do not ask people to do anything. I either command and they obey or I offer, in this case, I am offering to marry you." He put the stress on that last, "it's a different thing entirely."

She raised an eyebrow.

"I need an heir," he said bluntly, "which is the long and the short of it. The thrust of the matter is my current heir is a feckless idiot with holes in his pockets."

Her mind caught on the way he said thrust, she couldn't help it, he was an attractive man, despite the scars and she knew her own body and how it reacted. She had been raised to find such shows of power and virility attractive, her mother had always intended her to marry a peer, it was society's goal for maidens that they marry well and if there was sexual hunger there then it was a bonus. Maidens weren't sexless dolls even if society thought them so. He was standing in front of her half-naked, dressed like a hero in a novel with bare feet. She could admit she found him attractive. He was still a cock though.

"If I died tomorrow that feckless pink would inherit everything and he's irredeemable, God knows I've tried, he would burn through his inheritance in a year, perhaps two if he slowed down. I did not go to the Continent to try and protect England from the French and survive this," he swept his gloved hand over his face, "to doom my tenants to destruction because my cousin can't keep it in his breeches. Those laws of primogeniture, which I can't currently overthrow, mean I must marry and sire an alpha heir."

He crossed his ankles leaning back in her chair, and the more nonchalant his behaviour the more unwilling she was to shrink from him, her pulse pounded. His face might have been ruined but the rest of him was rather magnificent and she could admit that.

She decided to distract herself by focussing on his clothes. Even his shirt was exquisitely made, normally such things were made at home by girls learning to sew but the lawn was as soft looking as clouds, and the cuffs were immaculate, neither stained or frayed. His pants were exquisitely fitted, cupping muscular thighs and bare feet. Neither of his feet were scarred and she wanted to know where it tended.

"I know what you're thinking, Miss Martin." 

She doubted it.

"You're incredulous," that was true, "how could a woman of your social standing ascend to such a part of the peerage, you will be outclassed by other mari of the _beau monde_ , and they will almost certainly cut you, but you can be consoled by the material advantages. You will have a lavish home, generous lines of credit at all the best modistes and stores, a large settlement on the event of my death. You will be free to do as you wish, even engage in charitable work as you see fit, your days will be yours to spend as you wish," he leaned forward and tilted his chin up and smiled, "but your nights will belong to me."

She was silent because how was she supposed to respond to that. She decided how she should feel.

"I would visit your bed every evening, unless you are ill or having your menses, until you are confirmed to be pregnant."

She didn't say anything.

It was clear, the marquess was not just scarred he was entirely insane.

"My lord, you are not feverish?" she asked him.

"Not at all." He answered.

"I shall get your butler to send for a physician, perhaps you should lie down in a darkened room."

"Do you need a physician?" he asked with a smile.

"Perhaps I do, I think that I am hallucinating this entire conversation."

Was he offering to make her his mistress, to set her up with an apartment he could visit? She had clearly led him wrong when she was prepared to remove the dress - she really did need the money.

"Are you trying to seduce me?" she asked.

"Yes, nightly," he confirmed, "I said so, a minute ago, were you not paying attention."

"paying attention, yes," she admitted, "comprehending, not so much."

"I shall have my solicitors draw up the papers," he turned back to his desk, "we can do it on Monday."

"Do what?" she asked, this conversation had totally gotten away from her.

"Marry."

"My lord," she protested.

"Tuesday, then." 

"My lord," she continued but it was clear he wasn't listening.

"After that, my schedule is quite full," he flipped through the pages of his diary, "brooding, drinking, gorging myself, then on Friday I have an indoor battledore tournament."

"No." She said it clearly.

"No?"

"Yes."

"Make up your mind, Miss Martin."

She let out a slow deep breath trying to find a calm centre inside herself to make up for the crazy she found herself surrounded by.

Her eyes flicked to the clock which showed that it was almost four o'clock. After leaving here she had to return the gown, visit her landlord and go to the market so she had something to eat. She couldn't back down now, she needed that money.

"My lord, you called my work hardened whale vomit," she said, "you then asked me to remove my dress for money I had already earned. Then you declared that I should accept your ludicrous proposal of marriage. This entire conversation has made me wonder which of us needs a spell in bedlam. I have to come to the conclusion that you are sporting with me."

He smiled again, "a scarred recluse has few entertainments."

"Despite a full schedule of drinking, brooding, gorging oneself and indoor battledore tournaments, one would think that that was enough for one man." Her patience was lost, some teasing was fun but this was verging on cruel. He knew that she needed the money, he knew why she needed the money but this was verging on cruel. "I begin to see why Vidama Blossom jilted you, you are exceedingly,"

"Hideous," he offered the word, cutting her off, "repulsive, monstrous, beastly."

"You're a cock." She managed to press her lips together.

He laughed, and it was a warm sound that came from his whole body. "What a refreshing change," he said, "that I am reviled for my personality."

"My lord, you have given me the money, our business is concluded, I shall no longer impinge on your brooding time," he chuckled again, and she took slow steps backwards, reaching the door before she turned.

She had reached the door before he stopped her, "don't go," he said.

He put his hand on her shoulder, the one wearing the glove and it was like she was struck by lightning. From across the room, she could ignore his presence, she could feel the heat of him and the smell, cedar and musk and alpha man. She felt like he had torn the dress from her complete with stays and chemise so there was nothing she could hide from him and it was just his hand on her shoulder. The lace was soft but it didn't hide the heat of him.

When she turned she saw that he was moved by it too, as if a circuit had been completed by his hand on her shoulder.

For a moment Lydia entertained the fantasy of it, that he wasn't a brooding cock of a man, that he was maybe who he was before, and that they were strangers meeting for the first time with nothing between them but hunger but such fantasies could not be realised in the light of day.

She could see, at that moment, just how lonely he was.

She crushed the idea like a grape, her hunger had betrayed her before.

"You can't leave now, Miss Martin," he said, stepping back and pulling his hand back to himself. "We are just starting to have fun."

"I have no interest in this game, my lord," she said. Her composure was shot, she clenched her fist in her pockets around the notes and took a step towards the door.

"You forgot your cloak," she heard him move and then draped the wool around her shoulders, "don't bother to bid me farewell," he mocked her. She pressed her lips together, "I won't either, we both know that you will be back."

The Marquess believed that they would be reunited.

Not if Lydia could help it. It didn't matter if she found him attractive. The man was either insane or a raging cock. 

With steps walking perhaps faster than she would normally she made her way to the front door, where the butler opened the door with a polite nod and offered to find a hackney for her but Lydia wasn't prepared to wait. When the highly glossed front door closed on her she felt relieved, or at least that was what she told herself.


	4. Chapter 4

After Miss Martin left Peter drank an entire pot of tea in self sympathy. After his convalescence in Belgium, he avoided alcohol as he felt it impaired his iron control which he needed to avoid giving in to the terrible cravings for opium he had been left with, so he drank tea and lemonade like an unmarried vidama whilst complaining. He was relatively sure that the vidama wouldn't have whined quite as much.

He was sure that Miss Martin would return at any time now.

She didn't.

He settled down to supper at ten pm sure that she would return the next day.

She didn't.

It made him irrationally angry. He had offered her a fair settlement and it was a genuine offer, certainly, it was much more than a seamstress could expect. She would come to her senses any time now.

She didn't.

On day five Peter was feeling antsy and cooped up in combination with annoyed. It was raining so every time he mentioned to Kali that he might go out she frowned at him in a way that was much more threatening than it sounded and he backed down as if she was the master of the house. She was right, the rain aggravated his scars and made him ache which made him testy - going for a walk when he already hurt was just asking for trouble. When the rain stopped late into the night he put his foot down and demanded that she help him with his boots and she let him leave.

Because of his scars when Peter left the house he wore a greatcoat with the collar turned up around his face and buttoned tight, combined with a battered old wool tricorn that he had acquired in Belgium and was much more comfortable than the beaver hats currently in fashion. Kali insisted that he take his cane because the rain made him sore and he might need it on his journey although she knew he was only going to take a short walk around Knightsbridge in preparation for bed.

  
\---  


The entire debacle happened so quickly that it had been and gone before he had had a chance to process what had happened. To the south of Bloom Square - where Westfall House was located - was a small market with a few traders. In order to protect their pitch, and any goods left overnight it was not uncommon to see one of the traders sleep under their stall in case of an upset.

The trader, in this case, was a beta girl of maybe thirteen with a dirty face who hadn't awoken as three cutpurses were helping themselves to anything that they could carry - in Knightsbridge of all places. He was so outraged at the youths, who themselves couldn't be more than twenty, that he hollered raising his stick to drive them off.

The robbers were quick to react and fast on their feet and were halfway down the road before Peter reached them and the girl who had been sleeping under the stall started to wake. She did not see the three young men running down the street with their arms laden with fruit, she saw a man in a range coat, with the collar turned up to cover his face and a tricorn waving a cane like a sword.

Her immediate reaction was to her credit and Peter's detriment as she started screaming the name of every crime that she could think of, murder, rape, arson loud enough it was a wonder she did not wake all of London. As Peter approached trying to shush her before the screeching roused a hue and cry and an angry mob of Londoners garnished with pitchforks and flaming torches a light in an upstairs window came to life and a man, it was not a gentleman judging by the language that he used, stuck his head out of the window with threats for what he would do to Peter.

Peter, who understood that discretion was, in this case, the better part of valour, ran as fast as his legs could carry him with the hope he could get away before the man could enact his threats.

He was panting and sore when he reached Bloom Square and almost stumbled into the foyer panting and doubled over and almost suffocating under the heat of the range coat and hat. He grabbed the table that stood by the door and as his hat fell from his head for one of his footmen, he was sure that there were three of them, but couldn't name them with a pistol to his head, to pick up later when he heard it. A soft thwap noise like shaking out a down pillow and then "pretty girl, pretty girl."

That was just the cherry on an otherwise shit show sundae of a situation.

"Kali!" he shouted, "it's back."

Kali was not given to histrionics or shows of overt emotion. She viewed all of England with a calm disdain and the certain knowledge that given the opportunity she could kill everyone she encountered but that she chose not to. She walked around Westfall House like it was hers, and not Peter's, and begrudgingly gave in to his orders because he was injured and it suited her.

They at least shared an opinion on the interloper.

When she came in, carrying a wire cage in front of her the parrot on the balustrade flapped its wings again and addressed her. "Fancy a fuck, love, two shillings."

Moll the Parrot lived in the house that stood kitty-corner to Westfall House on Bloom Square. She was one of many animals that had overtaken the house when he had been on the continent and she particularly liked to wander. With her wings clipped she couldn't fly but she could escape like a stage magician, including opening her cage and managing to get into the next-door house to offer wares she didn't have to Kali.

She just mocked Peter.

Her owner, the vidame next door, assured Peter that she had belonged to a harmless old lady who had died with no relatives capable of taking the bird. The vidame was clearly an idiot because the harmless old lady was obviously a bawd and he might have maintained that she wasn't offering fucks to any alpha she saw, except Peter, and he wasn't sure at all what she was saying. 

Peter didn't believe him.

The neighbour was the son of a prominent alpha of the _ton_ , a Russian Prince who had moved to London twenty years before with his omega wife because of some politics in the area, so he remained a Russian Prince, although it was something to do with Warsaw that Peter could not remember or hadn't bothered to learn, and had raised the vidame in that house.

When Peter went to war the vidame was about to come out and when he returned he had married, taken over the house from his father who now lived in Brighton for his health and filled the place with animals, which included an otter in the pond, a hedgehog he kept in a pocket around his waist, a goat that the vidame insisted was not pregnant and clearly was, enough cats to get a beta committed to bedlam and a terrier whose back legs had been crushed in a carriage accident and used a small cart which had iron-shod wheels which brought up the most terrific clatter on Bloom Square's cobbled roads when he was taken for his morning walk right outside Peter's window and a squeaky wheel which was exactly what a knife being sharpened in hell sounded like. One designed to spike through Peter's ear and into his brain.

There was at least two, but perhaps as many as six, ferrets who were thieves and bit.

There was Moll, the parrot procuress, who seemed to enjoy breaking into Peter's house for the biscuits that Kali gave her and the opportunity to remind Peter of his scars with mockery.

Kali and the vidame had an understanding. Peter wasn't sure what it was but it meant that whenever Kali caught the bird, which could take upwards of an hour, Peter would have to return it.

The vidame had grown up in the house next to Peter's and Peter knew him well in the way that neighbours did, and he understood there had been some scandal in regards to his marriage involving a kidnapping, an elopement and his alpha possibly being wanted for a crime in Canada. Peter didn't care enough to find out the details but the alpha, Roderick Hale, no relation, had garnered a fortune in Canada and come to London where he made a second fortune buying up the debts of the _ton_ , meaning he was both incredibly wealthy and incredibly unwelcome. That seemed to suit the pair of them and their menagerie of rescued animals - many of which had at some point been rescued from Peter's house.

"I want a bath," Peter said making sure it was loud enough that at least one of the lurking footmen would hear him, "I have had the worst day and I want a bath and a cup of chocolate and my bed." He knew it meant that the parrot would have to stay overnight but it was already very late.

Putting the cage on the table with the door open Kali turned to help him with his coat, hanging it in the wardrobe and offering to help him with his boots.

\---

Because of his scarring preparing a bath for Peter was a bit of an event. He couldn't sit with his skin against the copper because the copper got hot from the water and hurt him so the metal had to be covered with linen. The water couldn't be too hot or too cold and had to contain seaweed and salt to soften it, so as often as he could he washed with water but did not have a full bath. He couldn't use traditional soap and had to order olive oil soap from a vendor he was sure overcharged him. He couldn't use a sponge because his skin couldn't take it and had to use a washing ball made of scraps of silk.

He shed his clothes in his bedroom for the footmen to collect and stepped into the bath to wait on his chocolate and for once in over a week he did not think of Miss Martin.

When his valet, a terrified young beta called Joshua, came in with the cacao oil and a fresh shirt he was considering a second cup of chocolate. He wanted a glass of brandy but he knew he couldn't. He rather despised the cacao oil, it had was softened with Ben oil and beeswax, smelled like woody chocolate thinned with cream and meant he smelled like a confectioners, and had the consistency of butter which was smeared on his skin as he sat naked on the leather bench drinking chocolate and thinking it might be too late in spring for a fire.

There was a moment's fantasy that the hands smearing him with cacao oil were small and white, covered in scars and calluses from needlework and plump white arms and soft red hair falling over her shoulders and collarbone.

If Miss Martin did not return the next day he would take matters into his own hands.


	5. Chapter 5

After her encounter with the Marquess Lydia returned to work and decided to tell no one what had happened. After all her peers would consider her crazy for not taking him up on his offer of even being his mistress as it would prevent going to bed with an empty belly. If you did that often enough then things like morals tended to fade away. It was easy to make a stand about propriety when your rent was paid and there were no holes in your shoes.

The idea of a London apartment with your own footman and own bed was worth putting up with a crazy peer for most of them.

He had given her the best part of a pound which would pay her rent for the next year, she could be moral about it.

If in the privacy of her room, with her quilts pulled tight about her and a fire banked in the stove to keep her warm - for she felt the cold keenly - she had impure thoughts about his shoulders, or the slant of his hips, or the barely concealed power of his thighs she could admit to herself he was a fine-looking gentleman but not for her.

She was sorting the fabric piles when she was called for. It was a necessary job and one she found soothing, sorting the remnants into cabbage, which were large enough to be used for toiles, and snow, which was too small and was shredded and then used for padding - all of the girls had a quilt stuffed with bits of lace and net and silks from gowns.

Miss Sydney Andrew was one of Lydia's regular customers. Her father owned a silk mill in Derby and as such, despite her wealth, she was considered _nouveau riche_ and didn't quite fit in with society. They wanted her dower of seventy thousand pounds but they didn't want her. She was pretty with strong black brows over dark eyes and a mouth like a rosebud, exactly what was fashionable, but despite her trim figure and fashionable wardrobe, she was as much an outsider as Lydia was. They had bonded over that and Lydia thought of her almost as a friend, and knew that Sydney confessed to Lydia both because she was discreet and because she had no other real friends. She had maids and she had Lydia and Lydia couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for her.

This was also her third appointment in four weeks and she had made the appointment to have two more gowns let out.

Lydia sighed to herself as she went from the toasty warm workroom to the fitting rooms which never quite took the heat from the stove as well. 

"I think I'm having too much cake at tea," Sydney said with a sad smile as Lydia took the gowns from her, "I,"

"It is well," Lydia said taking the packets from her and putting them on the counter to open, "I'm not going to judge," and that was all Sydney needed to burst into tears.

"I didn't mean to," she sobbed as Lydia offered her a handkerchief, thinking she might want to fetch the girl a cup of tea to settle her nerves, _Dona_ Calavera kept a kettle on the stove for her customers, "he just,"

"Who was it?" Lydia asked. The whole situation was so obvious to anyone who took the time to look. It wasn't tea and cake that was causing the girl to gain weight, but pregnancy.

"An artist," she said, "he was so charming and he saw me, I mean _really_ saw me."

"And is there no hope," Lydia left it open.

"No, he's on the continent now, he took a commission to paint Venice," Sydney said into Lydia's handkerchief. "I've been so stupid."

Lydia took her hands in her own to reassure her, "it is well, this can be solved. Have you considered, I know an apothecary, it can be taken care of."

Sydney jerked back, "I don't want to, not that, it's said to be worse than the baby, like daggers in you and then you might never have children or die." Sydney might have been naive and easily led but she was right about that. The treatments that the apothecaries had were vicious and not always effective. "I thought," she swallowed, "the season is almost over, I can go to the country, and find it a good home if I can find somewhere where I can have the baby."

"Do you have no friends who could?" Lydia asked, but she knew the answer.

"No, the ones who are my age are having their season and so if they go to the country it will be with their families and then it can't be discreet and my father will hear of it, I can't tell him, it will destroy him. He's all that I have."

Lydia knew what that was like too, at one point her mother was all that she had.

"I'll think of something," Lydia said although she had no idea what it was that she would think of. She felt so terrible about what had happened and could not help but see herself reflected in the situation. There would be a solution, she just didn't know what it was. "For now, we'll fix your gowns so that no one can tell, and if anyone asks, smile and talk about the wonderful cakes in London."

Sydney wiped her eyes and used the shop mirror to check her makeup. "Thank you," she said embracing Lydia, "I don't know what I'd do without you, my father means so much to me, I can't, he'll be destroyed." Lydia at least knew what that was like. She could let out the gowns and make her a pregnancy corset to both hide and support her bump as it grew. There were always places where a new baby could be left, orphanages and foster homes. At least the babe would be taken care of, even if Lydia had not been.

\----

After visiting the market for some supper Lydia returned to _Dona_ Calavera's to make the most of the late afternoon light to continue with her work. There was still heat in the stove although outside it was cool and grey despite it being mid-April and she loathed being cold so instead of returning to her room and having to wait to warm it, she visited her room, set a small low flame in the stove and returned to the shop so that it would be warm when she returned.

She had just opened up the seam to a lovely pale gown that she had made for Sydney barely four months before to give it more ease when there was a knock on the door. "We're closed," she called out. All the other girls had gone for the night, inviting her to join them for a night of dancing but Lydia was feeling old and tired and cold and she begged off although she would normally join them. The knock came again. 

Putting down her sewing in its basket she slipped her needles into the piece of fabric pinned to the shoulder of her cambric gown, _Dona_ Calavera bought rolls of the stuff to make sure her seamstresses were well dressed, Lydia went to the door.

Marquess Peter Hale was waiting when she opened it to tell him to leave. "I have an appointment," he said pushing past her. He wore a range coat that looked better suited to the battlefront and a wool tricorn hat so that he was almost entirely covered but she would have recognised him anywhere. He had a packet that he put down on the counter. 

"This is a dressmaker's, my lord," she said, "one that has opening hours that you are outside of."

"And if I wanted a dress." Lydia laughed to herself.

"Then come in, my lord, I am afraid I am alone at present but I can certainly take your measurements." She had hoped that the offer would cause him to leave.

She was wrong.

"Wonderful," he pulled off his hat and gave her a bow with it, before removing the range coat and hanging it on a peg by the wall, "I've been dying to get your hands on me, Miss Martin." 

She pulled out a length of tape, "I'll need you to take off your jacket and vest," she said, "to make sure we get a decent fit. I assume you want an alpha style gown," this was her job after all, and she had seen weirder customers than the Marquess of Westfall. She guided him to the wooden step that customers stood on so that they could be properly measured, and as she wrapped the tape around his chest she made a disapproving noise. "Oh this won't do," she said, hoping that the next might embarrass him enough that he would leave, "for a gown of any sort to sit right we will have to have the correct underwear," she went to a pegboard covered in white things that hung and rooted through them pulling out a temporary set of stays, one made of stiff coutil and crossed at the back to form the fit instead of being laced. Stays like this were used in place of finished stays as a gown was being made. It was not the largest that they had but it did have much more room in the bust area than he needed.

"Here we go," she said presenting him the corset, "you'll have to step down so I can put this on you."

He did.

The very ludicrous nature of it made her laugh. He was stood there in his perfectly tailored pants and shirt with his polished Hessian boots, with a pair of cross over alpha stays tied at his diaphragm. There was a surrender in allowing her to put it on him.

With her pencil she marked down the measurements of his upper chest, his biceps, the length of his arm from shoulder to elbow, around his neck, his waist, it meant that she was kissing close to him, her breath mingling with his breath and even if she had wanted him to touch her he didn't which made the wanting greater.

She could admit that she desired him. It didn't mean anything. Girls didn't act on desire, society made that clear. Wives were sexless, cold dolls that were chosen for breeding, and mistresses were chosen for their patron's desires. If a woman desired she had to deal with it herself with particulars and her own hands. 

"Was the package the fabric you wanted? So I can select the correct patterns." She wasn't going to let this go.

"No," he said with a grin, "that is an apology gift, I was not myself when we first met," he said, "so, a gesture." He swept his hand to show the box, "I saw it and thought of you."

With a sigh she walked over to the box and untied it, pulling back the tissue paper. A dark blue cashmere wrap opened itself in her hand and draped down to the floor. It felt as soft as clouds with a bright white and orange seed design. She did not believe for an instant that it was one of the cheaper wool wraps from Scotland. This was not a simple gift, this was a very expensive gift and one she could not accept. She could not have worn it without presenting herself as a lady without the protections that a peerage would give her, and one she could not have sold because no one would believe that she had come by it honestly.

He had to know that.

He had paid her two pounds for her work on the Blossom gown, this shawl was worth one hundred of them.

"You do not take no for an answer often, do you, my lord?"

He smiled at her, stepping down from the box. "Not really," he told her. "I thought you would look lovely in it."

"Let me guess," she said, "I would look lovely in only it." She was tired and she did not want to deal with his nonsense.

"I hadn't considered it like that," he shrugged, "but now I am, perhaps as a trade for seeing me in a set of stays." He rolled his shoulders, "can I take this off now, it's,"

"I didn't tie it too tight," she said, "it's well fit." She was angry and didn't want to concede to him in anything.

"It's not that," he said, "I can't wear clothes that are too tight," he untied the knot and let it loosen. 

"Sorry," she meant that, "I forgot."

He leaned back against the counter, "you have no idea how good it is to hear that. Might I take you to supper?"

"No," she answered, "I've already eaten." That was true and she was surprised that she was a little regretful about it, perhaps the idea of a fine supper at a hotel was enough to make her consider spending time with him.

"It is late," he said, "at least let me walk you home."

That she didn't refuse.


	6. Chapter 6

Peter was overwhelmed, when he had leaned over her he had been close enough for a kiss and when he looked down he could see the swell of her breasts against her stays and the gap of her fichu showing a strip of skin and the space between her breasts, a dark line against the pale skin. It held more promise than the narrow pass of Thermopylae.

By the martyrdom of Saint Perpetua.

Before he was burned he would have risked it and kissed her. He would have seduced her with little trinkets and witty teasing until she didn't know her own mind. She would have come to him willingly and let him set her up in rooms in a fine neighbourhood and when he was done with wanting her he would have found her someone willing to take his place in financially supporting her.

He might even have taken her back to a hotel where they could debauch each other for days before returning to their lives, her with a fuller purse and the knowledge that he knew what to do to prevent a baby.

But he had been another man then, he had been handsome and charming and selfish. He had walked into a room and knew that they all stopped to look at him. He knew the mari of all the peers there and which he could sleep with and those he could not by the importance of how their alphas needed to see him to get what he wanted.

He knew that the society mavens, those mothers and omega presenting their darling into the balls and assembly rooms in the hope of catching such a man, like fishermen at the bank where the child was the bait and Peter had been the prize, and he knew who could be coddled into a dark corner and who needed more. He had not been a good man, confident in being rich and handsome and then the war.

He wasn't that man any more. He was burned, inside and out, bitter and angry and his kisses must taste like vinegar.

He didn't need kisses. He didn't need to woo a lover, or choose from those glittering darlings. He needed an heir and to get an heir he needed a wife. His plan was simple, marry her, bed her and when she was swelling with child send her to Lincolnshire where she could raise the child in financial security, and if the child was not an heir then the process would be repeated.

"For your gown," Lydia said as she put away the tools of her trade, the paper tape she had used to measure him, her pencil, the shears tied to her waist by a length of twill tape, and the pad of fabric pinned to her shoulder which held her pins and needles into a small cabinet which she locked afterwards, "you'll have to go to the drapers for fabric, with your colouring I'd suggest a pink brocade," she said this entirely without lift in her voice to suggest it was a joke, "I was thinking plum but it might accentuate your burns. I can certainly make you a demi mask to cover them, especially if you are going to wear a wig with them."

"Really?" he asked, "I had thought blue, to match my eye."

"Blue is a brighter colour than the pink," she said calmly as she pulled her Brunswick over her shoulders, "it would make your shoulders look massive, even with padding around your hips you would look like a mason, if the gown is in pink we can add trim that isn't as obvious, giving you a more feminine silhouette."

He took her hand, running the pad of his thumb over a healing cut there, it looked like nothing more than a paper cut but the skin had been split and he could feel it. Her hands should have been soft and white, the hands of someone who had never done anything more arduous than writing a letter or pick fruit, but she had calluses and cuts and scars and there was a moment, just a flash, of wondering what her hands would feel like on his cock. "Are you not going to put your coat back on?" she asked, "or would you prefer to walk this part of London in just your shirt and breeches. There are a lot of married betas around who would certainly appreciate the show."

He let go her hand, and she took the opportunity to step outside of his reach, pulling on a pair of gloves and pinning a hat to her cap, changing her shoes from the white ones she wore in the shop, certainly part of her uniform, and putting on a pair in the same style but in mud-splattered oxblood stained leather with brass buckles. "I am not going to be your mistress," She told him, "I am not for sale."

"That cannot be entirely true," he said, "you work for a living and the work of your hands and fingers is entirely sold for profit."

"My lord," she had a way of saying it that was entirely designed to condescend to him, "if you don't know the difference between a woman's womb and her fingers I can see why you've had issue gaining yourself an heir."

He laughed. It was a dry, rusty sound but even as he put his hat back on his head he was still smiling.

"I very much know the difference, my dear," he said leaning in and running a gloved hand over the curve of her shoulder and down her back, over the pleats of her Brunswick, and ending against the padded swell of her ass. "I shall not mistake the two, well, not without being asked."

She sucked in a breath and then took a step away, as elegant as any coquette in London. "You seek to torment me," she said and even that was with a faint and mocking smile.

"No," he said, "but it might be an unfortunate side effect of me being me."

She made a noise in the back of her throat, clearly not liking being teased and the tight little moue of her mouth in her annoyance was adorable and he wanted to tell her so but she would probably take her shears back out of the closet to hit him with them. 

She was wearing a shop girls dress of pale grey cambric, a tightly woven fabric pulled tight over her stays and pinned in place. The skirt was quilted with a design of thistles and diamond shapes and was hemmed high enough to show her pretty ankles. Her Brunswick coat was her own, made of steel grey wool broadcloth with a hood and two pleats at the back to accommodate her skirts. It buttoned up her front and instead of pleated or gathered trim had a line of cheap riband along both sides of the fake stomacher and down the open hips of the skirt. It had fake short sleeves with riband cuffs and a lower sleeve to keep her arms warm that buttoned at each wrist. Combined with a miniature Bergere hat she looked like a normal beta woman of society, neither as rich as a peer or so poor that her clothes were worn through or irrevocably stained.

She looked like the wife of a young solicitor or merchant who could afford a house but not necessarily a household. She was dressed not quite as well as his household but better than some he had stayed in.

"You are incorrigible, it is one of the reasons that I do not want to be your mistress."

He gave a loud exaggerated sigh and lifted his one eyebrow to tell her what he thought of that idea. "I have said, several times now and I do not like to repeat myself that I do not want you to be my mistress, I want you to be my Marchioness, the words are not so similar I had thought." He gestured at the street outside the shop as she locked the door, "I would not be seen in this part of London without such intentions."

"And you wonder why it is that I think you have lost your mind." She said putting the key back into the pockets secreted under her skirts.

He looked at her, she was smaller than he had thought, only reaching his chin and so much more slender, more from youth than lack of food, she was pleasingly plump with arms like geese emerging from her sleeves and the promise of curves to test his hands against, but she was small where he was broad. He had the idea that naked she would be a goddess.

She tilted her head in agitation, and he was agitated too. He was not used to be denied anything and he couldn't understand why she thought he wouldn't want her. Someone had clearly made her feel very unwanted and Peter wanted to find that person and unleash some Catholic martyrdom on them that would be remembered through the ages.

"Lydia," he said, although he had not received permission to use her name. in his head he was using her name all along. "I want you, honestly, truly, to be my wife and I mean to own you entirely so that nothing might ever try the peace of your countenance. I do not want to share you with Dona Calaveras house and her idiot son who almost certainly flirts with you," if he did Lydia had not noticed, "or the quiet nights in some cold run down room stamping your feet down into your shoes because your toes are so cold. I want to wrap you up in down and silk and place you in front of the giant fireplace in Westfall castle and serve you milk and honey until you are sleepy then carry you to bed and spend days learning each place where your skin folds and the crevasses, the bend of the knee and the paper-thin skin of your wrist, I want to bury myself in you, Lydia, and I could not do that if I intended to let you go."

He didn't know exactly where the speech had come from, it was certainly true, and at some point, he had taken her hand and was staring into her eyes with his own so intently that she lost her footing and walked into an apple seller's cart.

She righted herself but not before he had reached out to steady her. She could feel the heat of him even though the layers of fabric over her shoulders, and the way he steered her out of the street and to a quieter patch of the path. He was exhausting, from the moment she had entered his office she had been on a whirligig and he was less of a man and more of a forced march, she was fighting to keep up with him.

"If you only want a wife," she said, "I am sure that there is a bevvy of society mamas and aunts who would happily oblige you with their darlings."

"Yes, but then I would have to engage a matchmaker, a negotiator and a solicitor all before I could speak to the darling and do you know how much work that is and how long it takes?" He didn't notice the way she stiffened, "and you are right here."

She stopped, "do you hear yourself right now?" she asked him, "you are not swaying me to your cause."

"Marriage in high society is a business transaction," he continued, "and takes months, and I could go through months and not know if the darling even knows who I am let alone likes me for anything other than my title. Like this, any negotiation in the marriage contract happens between you and me, not solicitors or parents or greedy relatives. I lose nothing to a match with you, no holdings or business interests and gain an intelligent, beautiful wife with no more interest in society than me. I do not have to endure dealings with some social-climbing mama or auntie who doesn't actually care what I do with their darling as long as they get what they want, and the darling themselves is some bland pretty thing with a fine education and the wit of a doorknob." Put like that she could see his point of view even if she didn't agree with it, "and you would gain a title and a fortune, also land and holdings of your own to manage in your lifetime, in exchange all I am asking is a few moments in the dark where you can lie back and think of whatever you wish, a pregnancy surrounded by the best healthcare that money can buy and every Harley street physician you can wish for as you swell like a tick on a dog, and then your life to do with as you will. What woman would not be swayed by such an offer?"

"what woman, my lord," she said those words with such delicious disdain he noticed, "would not be swayed to becoming a broodmare, one slightly less expensive, perhaps, than a thoroughbred horse."

"A broodmare," he said with a wolfish grin, "I like that, it would make me the stud."

"And thus the iniquities of the world are laid bare."

"I prefer stallion," he continued, "it sounds more virile."

"Ignore the horses," she said, making a noise of frustration and screwing up her mouth again to form that delightful little strawberry shape, "it is absurd to suggest that we could marry. We do not know each other. I am quite convinced that you are of ill mind, and the rest of it I am sure I quite dislike."

"As I said," his smile was slight and mocking, "this is a business transaction. Wedlock is not a matter of liking one another," but he did like her, "it is about the legitimacy of any children you bear in order to secure a line of inheritance. This is a marriage of convenience. You're living just above poverty," he was trying to be frank and not be distracted by the motion of her eyebrows at that moment, "and I have an obscene amount of money. I need an heir and you," he gestured towards her with a flourish, "are capable of bearing one. As soon as a pregnancy is confirmed you can leave London to one of several houses in Lincoln, I haven't decided yet if you would prefer the dower house, Lavender Lodge, or the converted hunting cabin, Strawberry Cottage, both sound idyllic but we would certainly have to visit so we can decide, but once the heir is produced we need have nothing to do with one another."

"Nothing to do with one another?" she repeated the last sentence as a question.

"As I said, you would have your own house in the country, Lincoln in charming and there are other houses nearer the coast if you would prefer, and a healthy allowance of perhaps six thousand a year, of course, we can also negotiate that, I would have had what I wanted and you will be suitably reimbursed for it."

When they turned into a busier thoroughfare he tugged up the collar of his range coat so that it covered his face whilst tilting his head down so that his burns were mostly covered. It was almost dark but even so, he did not want to draw attention, assured it would be negative. For a moment she felt sympathy for him and then tried to squash it down like a bug.

"You're assuming that this theoretical child will be an alpha and therefore able to inherit via primogeniture, what if you fathered a beta or five omega."

"You are a vicar's daughter, you could pray for a boy."

She smacked him lightly on the arm, "you are wicked, you are the imp of Lincoln."

"Whilst we are discussing our own weaknesses, you are being quite irrational. You are blinded by your pride and silencing your common sense. Spare yourself the moral wrangling and skip to the inevitable conclusion."

"That this conversation is further proof of your poor mental health?" She asked him, "I do not why you keep insisting that I will marry you."

"I don't know why you keep insisting that you won't."

"You are a marquess, I am a seamstress. That is all that there can be."

He held up his hand and counted off on his fingers, "you are a healthy woman of childbearing age, you are a gentleman's daughter. You are educated. You are probably pretty, it is hard to tell you do not flatter yourself the way that I am used to," he ignored her annoyed noise, "not that that matters but it means that our child shall have at least one parent who is not a monster," he pushed down his last finger, "and you're here, those are all my requirements. You will do."

He could not have made his proposal any more impersonal or insulting if he had tried, and she was glad he hadn't. He was a cock, cynical, angry, condescending and very rude.

He was right though, she was going to marry him.

Against all the thoughts she had in her head, against everything she knew and believed, against the will of society and the rankings it held so strictly his proposal was earnest, insulting, but genuine and she wasn't foolish enough to refuse him just because she was proud.

She didn't have much long term prospects. Seamstresses were only as good as their eyesight and long hours and dim light over tiny stitches ruined their eyes quickly and their fingers stiffened and she was already purchasing bags of herbs that she could stuff her hands into overnight to loosen them for the morning. Lydia knew that she should have been attending the dances with the other seamstresses, hoping to catch a husband that could keep them when their eyes went. She would be a fool to refuse him, a bigger fool to refuse to marry a Marquess, even one that might possibly be crazy - but she would be a fool to not marry a septuagenarian marquess with no teeth and incontinence stuck in his own bed by age and illness.

Yet Peter was none of those things. He was full of faults, so many faults it was not a wonder that they did not spill out on the floor behind him like a trail marking where he had been, he was strong, in the prime of his life and he smelled like men should smell, of cedar and leather and woodsmoke and something low and musky that she could spend a lifetime breathing in from the curve of his neck.

He offered her security, a child to dote on and a house of her very own with more money than she could think of. Her mother, a vicar with a fine living, did not have six thousand a year.

The idea of a quiet house of her own somewhere in the country, maybe walking distance from the sea, where she could help Miss Andrew when the girl had no one else it appealed more than he could know.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter's night could not go worse - probably

It was not until Peter stepped into the grass that he realised that it had grown full dark on their walk and if he was not mistaken they had entered Regent's Park, a large grassy part of the centre of London and one that was very dangerous for young ladies to cross on their own at night. Between cutpurses and rapacious lords, it was not safe but it was also several miles around and so although it might be quick to cross, if one stuck to the path, it was impractical to walk around. So he questioned that Lydia might cross it every night but she might have taken the opportunity of having a protector to cross it.

"Is this Regent's park?" he asked her.

"Yes," she said, "I suppose we should turn back."

"You don't live on the other side of the park?" 

"No," she answered, "I live in rooms above the shop, I was hoping you'd get bored and leave so I didn't have to show you where I lived."

Anything else that she might have said was cut off by Peter's colossal bad luck. "Give us yer valuables." Because of course, Peter thought, he could not walk a pretty girl home without being mugged.

There were three men, rough-looking curs in homespun clothes, stained with mud, wear and old beer. One of them was barefoot in the grass. They were unremarkable in London except for their purpose and the stink of old sweat and gin which Peter could smell from several feet away. One of them had a knife. The blade was about an inch long and solidly made with a sharp tip and glinting in the light from the torches that lined the path through the park. 

It was not enough for Peter to be robbed.

Peter was about to be robbed by men threatening him with an oyster knife. Even if they stabbed him it would likely not cause much damage and couldn't get deep enough to cause anything other than infection and his leather coat would probably cause the knife to slide off. He was not going to take them seriously if they weren't going to take themselves seriously first. Muttering something about Saint Stephen under his breath he looked at the three bravos and asked "really?"

"I said give us yer valuables." The man was drunk and his friends were behind him egging him on.

"We should just," Lydia started but Peter cut her off.

"No." 

"They have a knife," Lydia hissed.

"Barely," Peter answered, "look go, and I won't tell the Parish guard that you're working in Regent's Park."

"Listen to him," one of the bravos leered, "acting like a lord, like he's the Regent hisself, gets hisself a pretty girl and feels like he's the king of all England."

"Give. Us. Yer. Stuff." The one with the knife repeated and lurched forward. 

He was not near Lydia, certainly, he would have had to have taken a few more steps to reach her but he was close enough for Peter to react. It was like a change had come over him, and the charming man in the range coat was replaced by something more dangerous, something leonine. His very posture changed, one leg sliding back and his grip on his cane changing from it supporting him to be held like a club.

Peter had been a soldier and a duellist. He spent long hours in Gentleman Jackson's learning the craft of boxing and was constantly reprimanded for being a scrapper instead of a gentleman. He had learned to fight at Repton and time had polished the edges of the small boy throwing himself at much bigger opponents and bringing them down with his ferocity. He had learned to channel that skill until he was feared on the field of battle, considered an immortal good luck charm and as fearsome as their very artillery. Then there was the accident.

Yet Peter's body remembered and in that instant the pain was gone and he moved through a series of fluid gestures that he had thought that he had forgotten, using his cane like a sabre and not a foil he brought it hard down on the hand of the man holding the knife. He dropped the blade with a yelp and would have cradled his hand if the knob of the cane hadn't cracked him hard against the jaw.

Lydia found it hard to follow the way that Peter moved, how he disarmed the men and beat them and didn't stop until she screamed, and then it was like he came back to himself, taking a deep breath and resetting his cane, rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck.

It utterly changed the way she saw him.

She had seen him as an ineffectual fop; a soldier who had gone to the continent to prove his masculinity to his peers but had not seen action; the sort of man who goes to Gentleman Jacksons, not for exercise but to smoke cheroots with his peers as they supped liquor from hip flasks and laughed at the men taking instruction. 

Peter was none of those things. He was a fighter and she supposed she should have known it - people who weren't prepared to fight tooth and nail wouldn't have survived the sort of injuries he did.

The curs took the opportunity to flee as Peter caught his breath, "shall I walk you back?" he asked.

"I'll marry you," she said and took his arm, "I'll do it."

She had already agreed in her head and she hadn't expected to just blurt it out, but now he might think that she had chosen to marry him because he had saved her but her brain was too full right now to consider such thoughts. Peter had been ruthless and she had liked it. She couldn't consider that right now either. No one had ever done such a thing for her and that made it hard to think.

He looked down at her hand on his arm and said, "we can go back to Westfall house now."

Lydia had enough wit to say no to that, "not until we're married."

"I can have Kali get the bishop up now, and have us married before the ink on the special licence is dry."

His eagerness flattered her but it was ridiculous. "No," she said, "I have things I need to resolve, I have paid rent on my room, I have things," she only needed a day or two and she very much wanted him to understand that. She was not going to just accept his will even if he had just saved her from being robbed for the threepence in her pocket.

"I shall get you new things," he said and she could hear him smiling.

"You can't just," she said, "I need to find someone to take my room, I need to tell Dona Calavera."

"I can write to Dona Calavera and explain the situation if you patronise her shop the cachet and profit will soon soothe any anger she has that you didn't tell her yourself."

He had lived in a world where money solved everything and she was not going to just give him. The only thing she didn't think of suggesting was that he would ruin her because it was six years too late for that, but she had a good reputation in London.

"I need to get my," she paused for a fraction of a moment "cat." 

Peter considered that. He couldn't just replace a beloved pet with another, which would have been incredibly easy to do - the prince next door almost always had at least one litter of kittens in the house, but the bond was not something he could just badger Stiles for.

Lydia could see him considering something and so didn't want to mention, at all, ever, that she didn't have a cat. She was just stalling for time.

"You said you had battledore on Fridays, correct?" she was combing through every conversation that the two of them had had looking for something that would give her time, "tomorrow is Friday, I shall arrive at Westfall House on Monday at nine am sharp," she didn't give him a chance to argue, "that gives us both time to get our affairs in order, and go over the marriage contracts," he nodded, "then if everything is in place we can marry that day and you will only need a licence and not a special one, you'll have saved yourself some money which you can spend on a new coat."

She had found his vanity and was not above exploiting it, "what's wrong with my coat?"

  
\---

Peter was in quite a delightful mood when he returned to Westfall House, unaware of Lydia trying to lure a street cat in the alley beside her room with a piece of sardine and let Kali take his coat and hat which was strange because Lucas was the footman in charge of the door. He let her follow him into his office, telling her what she needed to arrange for the marriage before he even realised that it was unusual.  
  
"What now?" he said lowering himself into the couch with a sigh because he could not even have a few hours of peace and joy.

"His highness will be unhappy for the next week or so," Kali said in that calm crisp manner of hers, "his alpha has business in the country and the bear has been taken from the mews to a more suitable habitat."

Peter nodded looking through the letters on the table and then his mind did a sort of hop backwards.

"Did you say bear?"

Nothing tried the wide peace of Kali's serenity, she was utterly calm and tranquil. "Yes, he adopted it last week, rescued it I am told by Mrs Perkins," Mrs Perkins was their head cook and she was often found gossiping in the shared mews with the prince's staff. She often knew the gossip of London before the Prattler and she made the very best lemon tart in the city.

"I'm still stuck on the word bear," Peter admitted.

"It was a baby, brought in on a ship, someone he knows informed him and he sent his alpha and the bear was in the mews." Peter never went into the mews. Since his return, he had been aware that the prince was storing a small menagerie there but he had assumed it was mostly things like ferrets and the goat - he had not heard about a bear.

"So the prince, who adopts anything with a tail, took in a baby bear and is heartbroken because he couldn't keep it, because it's a BEAR, and his alpha is clever enough that he needed to be elsewhere during his inevitable breakdown?"

"That appears to be the meat of it, my lord," Kali told him.

It was in situations like this Peter resented the fact that he didn't drink. This sort of situation needed a drink. He could even commiserate with the prince, because he certainly drank, omega or not.

Peter was of the opinion than the prince would calm, and stop adopting every animal that had a sad story when he had a baby of his own and in the month since his return to London, he had had no such happy news. He knew that they were trying because his window stood kitty-corner to their window and they were loud enough he would pull a pillow over his head if both had left the sash open. It was not something he could complain about openly because they were in their own house, in the privacy of their own bed, and it only happened when both had opened the window but Peter had seen the prince grow up from birth - he didn't need to hear that.

"Why did you not tell me about the bear when it was in the mews?" Peter felt that it was the sort of thing that he should have been told about.

"We," by which she meant the household, "agreed that as it was temporary and we knew that it was only a few days until it was removed to the estate in the country where it can have a large habitat and certainly a better life than it would in London that it was not worth your attention, my lord, you have had so many more important things to worry about."

"More important than a bear in my back garden?"

"A baby bear," she corrected, "no larger than a dog," Peter often got the impression Kali was laughing at him. "It did not look old enough to be apart from its mother."

"A BEAR, KALI," Peter repeated, because she clearly wasn't getting the import of this.

"Compared to the lion it wasn't a big deal."


	8. Chapter 8

Peter had thought that the morning after Lydia had agreed to his marriage that he would wake softly with a warm delight that would spread from his very core. Instead, he was woken by the sound of small iron-shod wheels over the cobbled street outside his window accompanied by a shrieking eee eee eee.

Tugging a pillow over his head Peter tried to turn over and go back to sleep but the noise did not abate any and so reaching across to take his pocket watch from the ceramic sleeve on his bedside table he saw it was nine of the clock, and like most peers, he didn't like to be awake before noon.

It wasn't Willoughby's fault. Willoughby had been a friendly, if incredibly stupid, wire-haired rat terrier who had been run over by a cart and if the Prince had been one whit less determined as kind Willoughby would have died but fortunes were poured into his recovery and now he remained a friendly, if incredibly stupid, wire-haired rat terrier who happened to need a small contrivance with two wheels - one of which shrieked like a damned soul - to continue his exuberance. 

Willoughby needed to be walked. He needed to do his business and sniff every fence post and bush and because of his wheels, it was better that he did it on the cobbles. 

Swinging his legs down over the side of the mattress Peter wondered how much it would cost to develop a set of wheels that didn't clatter like someone angrily dropping dishes into a butler's sink and had an axle that didn't sound like a banshee being tortured. He would pay it.

After visiting the commode, he had had a plumbed toilet fitted in the house whilst he was on the continent, but it was in the gardens and was cold, so he used the commode and it could be emptied into the toilet. the mechanism managed to be louder than Willoughby but it had eased the work in the house and Peter had seen Zachary, afflicted with a terrible stomach complaint, running to the outbuilding with his hand on his belly and slamming the door behind him. 

He rang for Josh and dressed lightly for the day, eschewing a jacket but wearing a waistcoat that he left open, telling Josh that his burns were sensitive today and he did not want tight-fitting clothes. He had intended to celebrate in his own way, asking for a lemon cake from the kitchens with the intent to eat it all, himself, with a fine pot of tea.

Lydia had agreed that she would arrive on Monday morning, it now being Friday, for the wedding and she had been right that he would need to arrange that, even if all it meant was telling Kali that he was being married on Monday and to arrange the details and paying for anything she felt necessary.

Dressed, but in his slippers, Peter went down to the salon to eat a light breakfast of brown bread and honey and was sipping his coffee, black, strong and very sweet, when Kali knocked and entered. She never sat in his presence, even when he urged her to, instead she laid the morning newspaper on the table with a nod of the head and said: "I think this might be of interest to you."

Peter did read the paper. He liked to keep abreast of current affairs; the war; things that would alter his investments etc and occasionally looked at the scandal sheet with a sort of furtiveness that would have better suited German erotica and enjoyed reading the obituaries for the bad poetry. He was a simple man.

Kali had opened and pressed, the paper to page five where a large image of a man in a caped leather range coat and black tricorn was illustrated with the words Monster of Mayfair Strikes Again. 

For the second time in as many days, Peter regretted the decision not to drink.

Scanning the story it told of three young men innocently walking home through Regents Park when beset by the Monster of Mayfair, who had been dragging a young woman against her will through the park. They had, as good Christian Englishmen, leapt to her defence whereupon they were attacked by the aforementioned Monster's cane and beaten quite severely. There was talk that one of them might lose an eye. It was described as being the second appearance in as many weeks where previously he had tried to accost a young woman of excellent reputation but was prevented by a raised hue and cry.

Peter swore. He named several Catholic martyrs and the terrible methods of their martyrdom. Then he offered Kali a cup of coffee. "They were trying to mug me!" he protested.

Kali refused the coffee with a polite demur but said nothing. She offered him the sugar bowl instead. Kali could say more with her silence than she could with her words. She put his mail on the table from the pockets she wore under her coat. She was about to leave when Peter called her back, "can you arrange for my solicitors to call as soon as," he said, "and any word on finding someone to decipher my ledgers?"

"Is there a reason you wish to speak to your solicitors, are you calling on them or bringing them to you?" She asked in that calm modulated tone that gave Peter the idea she was laughing at him. "Is it in regards to this monster of Mayfair news?"

"Miss Martin has agreed to marry me, on Monday, she will need the Marchioness suite prepared, a maid and an abigail, you can take them from the household I presume, if not hire them from a reputable agency. I need to speak to my solicitors that they might acquire for me a licence and prepare marriage contracts. I was with Miss Martin when we were attacked in the park." Kali slightly raised an eyebrow at that, with the sort of steady assurance that that explained everything that she had needed to know, "and Miss Martin will be bringing her cat."

"Will that be all?" she asked, "for I am thinking I might need to hire a secretary for you if you find yourself as busy more often."

Peter thought it over pretending to ignore the remark, "for now," he said, "I shall let you know if it changes." He went back to his breakfast muttering "Monster of Mayfair- like I don't live in Knightsbridge."

"My lord," Kali said from the door, "are we still engaged to play battledore tomorrow?" Had she been another alpha Peter might have said her look was impish, "I was hoping to defeat the Monster of Mayfair in an epic battle."

"We live in Knightsbridge," he called out to her as she closed the door.

\---

Lydia should not have been surprised at the carriage that appeared to take her to Westfall house, or the three footmen who came out of it to gather her things with barely a word to confirm she was in fact who they had come to collect. They took the basket with the cat, after lifting the blanket to check its cargo, and replaced it with a basket full of freshly baked bread and a small flask of chilled coffee.

Lydia assumed, correctly it turned out, that Peter's butler had arranged everything.

Arriving at Westfall house she took the basket with the sleeping cat and before she had even seen Peter she was introduced to a solicitor called Alan Deaton who asked her what she expected from the marriage in order to write out the marriage contract, after that, still clutching the basket she was led to what would be her rooms and passed Peter in the hallway.

To his credit, he looked as overwhelmed as she was. He reached out and she put the basket in his arms before she realised he had been trying to welcome her with a kiss on the cheek.

"Welcome to Westfall House," he said holding the basket. He kept his face turned a little away from her to hide his scars in the darker shadows of the corridor leading to the stairway, "Lydia," she wasn't sure how she should feel about the weight of her name in his mouth, "and," he tugged back the blanket to reveal the cat.

Lydia paused. He wanted the cat's name, which was a perfectly reasonable request but Lydia had, in all the panic and things she had to do, which included securing food for the beast so it didn't escape back into the alley where she had found it, a brush because the long-haired creature had been alive with fleas and lice which she had removed with the same shampoo they used in children's hospitals, and telling Dona Calavera and finding someone to take her room, even with the rent paid up for most of the year and only in a few days she had made a tremendous oversight. The cat did not have a name.

He was a beautiful cat, with long black hair that formed a mane around a pointed almost fox-like face and bright gooseberry eyes. The horse doctor she had taken him to had been full of praise for his thick coat until the cat clawed his arms bloody.

"Knickers," she said because it was the first word that popped into her head. "His name is Knickers." At least she was sure, after drugging him, with drops bought at a premium from a local horse doctor, so that she could deflea him, that he was male.

"Welcome to Westfall House, Knickers," Peter had a rapacious smile and his eye never left Lydia's even as he reached into the basket to deliver a small scratch behind the cat's ear. The cat was not sociable, Lydia had wooed him inside with fresh sardines and a warm cushion in front of a stove, he had been a house cat for barely two days, he did not want to be scratched and reacted by biting Peter, yowling, jumping from the basket and vanishing through an open door.

"He's not good with new people," Lydia offered and Peter, shaking out his finger and Lydia was glad to see that there was no blood, laughed.

"He'll fit right in."

That done Kali, with a young girl in the house uniform and black hair caught in a linen cap, not unlike Lydia's, appeared, "Come along, my lady," she said, "and we shall get you ready whilst we wait for the priest."

The bustle of being put in a bath and then dressed in brand new clothes, including a lovely _Robe a la Francaise_ with a pleated back in pine green with gold print, the same fabric had been pleated to create a detail down the sides of the mantua and skirt as well as horizontal panels on the skirt, the same pleating covered the stomacher but at the line between her breasts was a bright red bow and a spray of cream lace, the same bows were at each elbow to join the _engageants_ which fell to her wrist and stitched with tiny white flowers.

With her hair dressed in a fashionable _coiffure banane_ , with her hair caught in twisted pinned curls around her head, like a bunch of bananas, and braids pinned up at the back. With matching jewels she suspected but hoped were not real emeralds, because she already felt overwhelmed with the wealth of it, because the money made it real in a way nothing else did, she didn't recognise her reflection in the silvered glass. 

She looked like a marchioness and not a shop-girl.

Kali seemed to understand her nervousness for she handed her a glass of brandy which Lydia drained in a single swallow, coughing a little before checking she had not spoiled the abigail's, who had been introduced as Tracy, work in painting her face.

With a deep breath Lydia raised her head, reassuring herself that hardship defined character because one must rise against it, one step at a time had seen her walk to London in the worst snowstorm at a decade, one step at a time could see her walk down the stairs and sign the marriage contracts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lydia's dress and hair can be seen here
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack-back_gown#/media/File:Robe_%C3%A0_la_Fran%C3%A7aise_MET_DT207671.jpg


	9. Chapter 9

Peter had suspected that under her ugly dresses and linen cap that Lydia might be pretty. He was used to women who knew how to flatter plainness into beauty with clever use of cosmetics. He knew at least one matron used clay and powder to reshape her nose, and most of them used rouge to change the shape of their mouths. Lydia had been passably pretty without cosmetics, her skin was fresh and clear and was easily her best feature until Tracy had dressed her like a lady and Peter forgot how to breathe.

The gown had been one of his mother's and was about ten years at least out of fashion, but the colour suited her colouring and brought out the light colour of her red hair. Vidama Blossom had been a redhead, her hair a dark deep colour like autumn maple leaves where Lydia's was the soft, warm colour of old Venetian gold and pulled up away from her head it showed the perfect lines of her neck and the shells of her ears, now adorned with pearl drops. A lace and ribbon choker circled her neck and raised her jaw, and her lips had been painted the colour of the bow on her gown. Her make up suggested rather than demanded attention, a little shadow around her eyes and colour on her mouth, and Peter had had no preparation for her to be a beauty.

She had been a shop-girl, and he wondered if he hadn't noticed her cambric work dress and shapeless linen cap more than he had her. Had he suspected she was a beauty he might not have so fervently pressed his suit, because realising it he could hear the words again "how can I expected to lie with that?"

She dipped a low curtsey in the heavy silks and inadvertently gave him a delightful view of the top of her breasts. She had skin like milk. He wondered if she was a true redhead and if he would have the pleasure of discovering it. He had plans regarding any congress between the two of them, and such things as discovery were not part of it. Yet there was a part of him, who upon seeing the top of her breasts with a lace trim wondered if she had those pale pink nipples which were only natural to true redheads and what his own skin would look like contrasted against her own.

He had desired her as a shop girl because she was a woman and he hadn't put his hand on willing flesh, other than his own, since Cadiz and that was long before he had been burned and endured the long healing, so nearly three years of abstinence had made any woman, for such were his preference, almost a succubus she had such power over his desire. Seeing her now as his marchioness, as his wife, he was thunderstruck for she was gorgeous. 

She was beautiful, prettier even than Vidama Bloom who was considered a diamond of the first order, and Peter had not seen that before because he had been stupid and not seen.

He nearly fell over his chair standing up to help her into the couch where the marriage documents were laid out. He had hired a solicitor on her behalf and when the solicitor had questioned his allowance for her of six thousand a year he had raised it to ten. He watched as she read over the documents. "Is there anything you would like to add?" Peter asked, half wanting her to quarrel with him over the details because she had been contentious for all of their acquaintance and he wanted to see how she looked with her face flushed with annoyance.

"Yes," she said, raising her jaw in a sham of imperiousness. "Whilst we share a house, my lord, I wish us to share at least one meal a day."

"Saint Lucy's eyes, woman, why?" He knew he was a terrible person and couldn't imagine why anyone would voluntarily spend time talking with him, let alone be in the position to look at the ruins of him. 

"I thought that whole intent of this marriage was that I have your legitimate heir and raise them in the country," he couldn't argue with that, "and that child will have questions about their alpha parent, and I cannot answer those questions unless I know you, so we can share meals, it also makes less mess for the staff to clear up, it means setting up one meal in one location as opposed to serving us both on trays whilst we haunt the halls of this place only coming together for the express purpose of fucking."

Had Peter been taking a drink he might have sprayed a mouthful at her use of the word. She wasn't as coarse as some of the women in London, there were girls in Covent Garden whose language would turn that of a sailor white but ladies didn't have such a coarse vernacular. The Russian Prince in the house next door didn't even recognise the word when shrieked at him by his potty-mouthed parrot.

He was so surprised by the curse word that he simply agreed to her demand, and could see that she was aware of that and had chosen to do so deliberately.

He had known that she was smart but that she was so duplicitous he found delightful.

He agreed that the codicil be added and both signed the documents.

The vicar hired for the ceremony was one well known to Peter from charity collections and meetings, a portly fellow given to wiping his face constantly with a very pretty handkerchief and took both his payment for the ceremony and the subsequent donation with assiduous praise about how it would help the children but Peter didn't listen. He did notice how the man practically slavered over Miss Martin's breasts and did not once look her in the eye.

Peter expected a leering congratulations but neither the two solicitors or the vicar, perhaps detered by the large donation or Kali's all seeing eye, said nothing.

After the perfunctory ceremony, obtained through special licence and accompanied by a ten pound donation to the vicar's favoured charity all of them sat down to a wedding breakfast prepared by Peter's kitchen. Chilled pigeon was served with a selection of preserves, cheese and other sliced meats, fresh tomatoes from the garden's hothouses and grapes were set for the guests to help themselves.

Lydia, and he felt sure he could call her that now that the ink on the marriage licence was dry, was calmly witty. She reacted well to flattery but calmly removed the fleshy hand of the vicar when he placed it on her arm without comment. Peter wasn't sure if she had learned the skill as a dressmaker, having to deal with pawing husbands and other men who believed they owned her because she was a woman, or as the daughter of an Essex vicar who was expected to marry well.

"I had meant to ask," Deaton, the solicitor who managed most of Peter's accounts asked, "if you were a vidama?"

"Would it matter?" she asked tilting her lovely head, "what would it change?"

Peter answered her and she pursed her painted mouth and repeated what he said as a question "Annie?"

"An E," he made it clearer that there was a break, "that would be the difference, a vidama would be a Marchionesse instead of a marchioness on the paperwork, that is how much it matters."

With Peter answering so succinctly he had shut down any complaint that Deaton might work into his accounts. He had made clear, several times, that he believed her to be a mountebank who intended to steal Peter's fortune. Peter had replied he had more than enough fortune that he could afford to give her a good living and had increased the annual amount. It was through those arguments with his solicitor that he had raised it from six thousand a year to ten.

When it became clear that the solicitor was going to cause trouble, the marriage was signed any objection now was moot but Deaton was determined, by asking questions, Kali smiled, "my lady," she said, "since you have finished eating, perhaps you will allow me to introduce you to the staff." 

"One wonders," Peter said cutting a thin slice of pigeon, "why you are so intent to question my decisions, Mr Deaton?" he popped the meat into his mouth and d chewed it slowly. "One cannot also help but wonder it is associated with the discrepancies I have found in my ledgers."

"My lord," Deaton diid not stammer as he answered, "my firm has loyally served your investments since your father was Marquess."

"And yet," Peter put the knife down on the table, "you forget which of us is signing the cheques and which of us, therefore, makes the decisions."

Deaton lowered his eyes to the slice cold pork that he was currently slathering in apple sauce but said nothing.

"I must say, my lord," the vicar, whose name Peter had immediately forgotten, "that is spread is absolutely top-notch, one must pass one's compliments to the chef, what is their name that I might pen a note that I can be properly effusive in my praise of her divine cooking."

"We call her the Salamander," Peter said, enjoying the way that the man blinked in confusion, "she hasn't answered to any other name since I was a babe, the story goes that she chased one of the kitchen boys around the herb garden with a salamander hot from the fire for burning the bread, but I think she spreads it herself." The vicar gulped and washed down what he was eating with the wine, "I pay her handsomely, of course," he continued, "in the hope that she will do it again to relieve one of the boredom of London out of the season."

Kali had been right, he very much enjoyed being an ass.

\---

After the breakfast which went on much longer than he had hoped he returned to the darkness of his office and worked by lamplight on his ledgers which seemed to get more and more confusing the longer he worked on them.

It was the sort of situation that needed a glass of wine to ease but he understood that if he started drinking wine he might not stop and if he lost control of his iron grip on his sobriety he would add laudanum and then his hard long journey to not relying on opium to get through his day would be wasted because he wouldn't stop.

His burns were excessive and hurt if he wore clothes that were too tight or he sat in the wrong position too long. He had started getting megrims since the accident because he couldn't properly loosen the muscles of his shoulders and sitting hunched over his desk didn't help.

He could hear people coming to the door, suggesting Kali was keeping Lydia busy, probably with modistes and milliners and stay makers and all the things that a woman needed that he had no idea about. He had told Kali to do so, after all, including explaining how Ms Finch, the housekeeper had to go to the country for family reasons, so each of the callers he ignored because if it had anything to do with him Kali would tell him.

He didn't notice the passage of time, for he kept his curtains drawn and his lamp lit until Lydia came in with a tray of tea for him. It had a few triangular shaped sandwiches and fresh madeleines which she could not know was his favourite. 

She placed the tray on the table in front of the couch and sat down with a flump. She had removed the elaborate robe a la Francaise for jumps and a petticoat, with her hair, brushed out and gathered in a braid that was pinned around her head. She still looked remarkable.

"Those curtains are real velvet aren't they?" she said and that was her opening for conversation, "the colour is lovely, they'd make an excellent riding habit."

"You want to turn my curtains into clothes?" he asked, "didn't Kali tell you you could just go to the drapers?"

"She did," Lydia added, "I just think its a shame for such beautiful fabric to hang there, especially as you have shutters and you never let the light in, you could hang black broadcloth there and get the same effect."

Peter had a premonition a lot of their marriage, short as it would be because it was only until she was pregnant, would involve her years of skimping and saving every half penny and now she didn't need to, and it would take some time for her to realise that. 

From her pocket, she pulled some fabric and pulled a needle from her bodice, that he had not noticed and a bobbin and small nub of beeswax and working by another lamp which she turned the light up on, began to work.

"What are you doing?" he was genuinely agog because it looked like she was actually making something. Mostly mari of the _haute ton_ worked at useless industry, like embroidery. What he knew of embroidery was that it included a hoop, which his mother had called a tambour, and coloured skeins. Lydia had a bobbin of white thread and a cushion and she had kicked off her slippers and pulled her legs up on the couch giving him a tantalising flash of her ankles in bright green stockings with a scarlet clock that clearly matched the dress she had been married in.

"Just finishing this partlet," she answered calmly and then shook it out so he could see what it was that she was making.

"Why?" he asked because it totally baffled him, "isn't that what Beth or Tracy does?"

"I have the time," she said, "and it is almost finished."

"And?" he thought he should press this.

"And?" she asked.

"You are a marchioness now," he said, "and marchioness doesn't make her own partlets." He was surprised that he had to specify that.

"It barely takes any time," she told him and nipped the thread off with her teeth.

"You have staff to do these things, you are paying people to manage your underwear." He repeated that.

"And Beth is currently making me a shift, I have ordered several new gowns, stays, stockings and even slippers, I have hats coming and I have been overwhelmed all day with people insisting that I don't know how to take my own measurements, primping and preening me like a doll, and I have come here to escape because I assumed you would let me work quietly."

"You are a Marchioness," he repeated, "you don't work."

"Then what can I do, if you are so certain," her tone was arch. "Perhaps I should just lie on the couch with my legs spread until I am impregnated and the large allowance you have given me can accrue until I have provided the necessary heir and spare by which point I have lost my figure, with lack of exercise, and have to be wheeled about in a bath chair like an old lady but with the girth of the prince regent."

"You don't have to take an arch tone," he said. "And hyperbole is hardly witty."

She raised an eyebrow and went back to stitching. This was clearly going to be an ongoing argument with her. He decided if she did it in private he would not argue overmuch. She would assimilate to her new wealth and it was only a partlet, a small fragment of linen with a lace collar.


	10. Chapter 10

On the first night of her marriage Lydia shared an excellent supper with her new husband. It was not served in the main dining hall, a room that looked like it had not been used in at least five years, but in Peter's office where plates were put on a table by the window, which was cracked open. It was getting dark outside so Peter allowed the shutters to be slightly open. He did not know why he bothered so to hide his scars as everyone had already seen them, but she understood vanity was a cruel mistress.

The staff brought a tray with two large bowls, covered with a cloche, and two sets of stacked plates and silverware. One of the other footmen followed the first carrying jugs of small beer and silver tumblers to drink it from. A third had a large plate of flatbreads. It was not that there was so much food that it needed three people to carry it but that there was a lot of small bits that didn't fit on the trays that they carried. 

As soon as the door opened Peter looked up and saw that it was supper and moved to the covered table by the window, bringing his lamp with him. He removed the cloche with a noise of pleasure and started to spoon the contents, a curry thick with meat and vegetables and steamed rice. "I love special curry," he said to Lydia as he poured her some of the small beer.

"Special?" she asked because she had not expected this. She wasn't sure what it was that she had expected over dinner but it hadn't been this.

"The kitchen gathers all the cold meats in the store and throws them in the curry to stop them from going to waste. It was something they did when the house was shut up and is accidentally incredibly tasty. It is a question whether I would serve it to the Prince because it's very good but it's servant food, be careful, it's quite spicy."

It was delicious and Peter, noticing that she was struggling with the spices, ordered bread and butter from the footman she had not noticed in the doorway. She was surprised how invisible the boy, Corey, could be. He brought them straight away, fresh sliced white bread and a pat of butter in a bowl that she could butter the bread herself.

When he took the jug of small beer away he left the door open a crack so that he would not disturb them when he came back in and allowed the cat to enter. Just after Kali had taken him away Knickers had vanished into the house, which Peter was not willing to admit was a relief. The house was big, he had expected it to be at least a day before he saw the creature again but the cat slunk in like he was lord and master, jumped up on the table with the food and immediately sank his face in the butter like it was a treat put aside just for him.

Clutching his napkin to his chest Peter burst out laughing.

Lydia, who had been trying to remove the yowling scratching beast from the butter dish, had not expected that. 

"Saint Agatha's tit's," Peter swore, "he's licking the butter." Which just made him laugh harder. He was laughing so hard that he could not help her for laughing and Lydia had no idea what was so funny and so was reassured that she had married a lunatic. She managed to remove the cat from the table by putting the butter dish, which was now a lost cause, on the floor. 

When Peter had composed himself, having to wipe tears from his one good eye, and with chuckles still escaping him, he apologised for his lack of composure and then lost it again when the cat looked at him askance with a muzzle full of butter.

He was eventually able to explain that when he was a child he had been denied a pet cat because his mother had hated them, but he had not understood that she considered them a necessary evil, and the excuse that she had always given was that "cats lick the butter." Over his childhood, he had come to acknowledge it as a parental truth, one of those lies that they always brought out when they wanted to out logic a small child. It was a myth, he thought, and rather than say she just could not abide cats she said that "cats lick the butter."

As a knowledgeable adult, he had accepted this as a distant truth, the sort of thing that would never be challenged because it wasn't true. Cats were carnivores, they liked meat and they liked to hunt for it, although the prince had an army of the creatures fed on kitchen scraps from several kitchens, as well as a delivery from a local fishmonger, yet he had never seen him feed them the butter.

"It was one of those nebulous untruths," he said, sipping his small beer, "the sort of thing everyone knows is untrue but no one questions and here, he licked the butter."

Lydia had almost reassured herself that she had not married a crazy person, almost.

When dessert was served, a warm syrup cake with a jug of fresh cream, Peter poured a little of the cream into the butter dish for the cat and got a baleful glare in return before Knickers deigned to take the treat.

"I thought we could discuss what you expected of tonight," he said after letting his tongue curl around the dessert spoon in a way that was frankly obscene. She would have been lying if she said she wasn't both excited and trepidatious about it. He was a good looking man, even with the scars, and he knew his way around a body, and she was more than familiar with the pleasure her body could bring her in her own hands but she wanted to know what he could do with her body. He could be excellent, or he could be selfish.

Not knowing what to say and how not to betray herself she thought of her sewing and said nothing.

"I expect you to wait for me in the bed," his voice became a little wooden like he was reciting a script to learn it. "There will be no lamps lit, no embers in the hearth, the curtains and shutters will be closed."

"Then the room will be pitch dark," she said. She had expected some peccadillo but this was strange, even for a nobleman. Gossip lingered, omega who were prostituted for an alpha who liked to watch, or alphas who liked to be bound and beaten, and working as a seamstress Lydia had vanished into the foreground working whilst nobles gossiped as if she was not there. She was not unaware that the nobility often had strange tastes but this was new to her.

"Yes, that is the plan. I shall come to you before midnight if the clock tolls twelve," she assumed that he meant the monstrosity of a grandfather clock in the hall which was carved and sounded like a church when it sounded the hour it was so loud, "and I have not come you can go to sleep." Later, when she had considered it she realised that this was a kindness in its way because it meant that she would never have to question him coming. He was trying to make this easier for her. However, like most things he was making an ass of it.

"So, I am to lie in bed, in pitch darkness and wait for the chimes?" She asked wondering if he would hear how ludicrous it was. He didn't.

"Yes," he said and poured her a glass of sherry hoping that would end it.

"Do you have requirements for how i should dress? Perhaps I should retain my stays and petticoats so that you can enjoy rummaging under them." 

"You are being arch again," he said.

"You are being oblique," she said, "if you wish the room to be dark I shall manage it, but it shall come to ruin." She took a sip of the sherry watching him through lowered lashes.

"Thank you," he said, "and however you usually sleep is fine, I have no real preference." She knew as soon as he said it that it was a lie but he would allow it, there was no point in trying to look seductive if the room was that dark.

It was only later, as Tracy brushed out her hair for a braid she could sleep in and Beth turned down the bed with a hot brick wrapped in wool to warm the sheets she made the connection. Peter wanted the room dark not because he had unusual sexual tastes but because he wanted to spare her the sight of him. He considered himself hideous. She had been a dressmaker for six years: she had seen hideous, nothing could surprise her now.

Her new shift was as soft as silk, the linen buffed and polished to an exquisite softness and almost sheer against her skin so that by lamplight her body formed a verdant silhouette of curves. She knew she had an excellent figure, with forearms as plump as geese and heavy thighs, round breasts and a soft stomach, privation had given her a curvy slimness that had turned to almost asceticism in most of the other girls in Dona Calaveras. She was paid fairly for her labour, it was just rarely enough and now she would never have to scrimp and save for a single pastry for her birthday, she could have them delivered by the cartload and eat them all herself and all Peter would say is use a napkin.

She felt beautiful, naked but for her shift and stockings - she felt the cold most keenly - she climbed into the bed, with its crisp linen sheets warmed by the hot brick and the pillows fat with down and wondered if she would struggle to fall asleep.

Peter arrived between the chimes for quarter to twelve and twelve. Lydia had thought he would bring a candle to light his way but he didn't. She saw him as a dark figure in the doorway, wearing a banyan and taking a moment to steady himself before he entered, then closed the door behind him. 

Following his strict instruction about total darkness Lydia had had the maids put away the furniture that moved, like stools so that he would not be impeded on his journey, nevertheless only a few moments later there was a heavy thump followed by the bellowed curse "St Stephen's stones," and him marching angrily back towards the door where he yelled for Kali and a honey plaster.

He had walked into the linen chest at the bottom of the bed.

Perhaps an hour later she heard the front door open and close and the tap tap tap of his cane on the cobbles outside. Sure he was not coming back that night she went to sleep.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those not in the know I recently got a puppy  
> if you have ever tried to do anything with a puppy in the house you will know why it took so long  
> for those of you who have never had the pleasure - imagine cthulhu with more teeth constantly demanding your attention and you're about halfway there  
> the puppy years are exhausting, but he's nearly six months old now, he should calm down a little, right, right?

Peter was woken by the daily squealing of Willoughby's cart on the cobbles and found himself unable to just go back to sleep. He did try for several minutes, attempting different positions and huffing breaths but none of this worked, so he swung his legs out of bed and rang the bell to summon Josh to help him dress.

He was always out of sorts when Willoughby woke him.

He had breakfast in his office, at the table by the window that overlooked the private side garden which was why he was surprised by the Russian Prince walking past, and who then, upon noticing Peter sat there, rapped on the window to say "hullo."

There were several reasons why this was odd, the least of which was him trying to open the latched window from the outside to continue the conversation.

Mieczyslaw Anafiel Hale, no relation, _nee_ Stilinski, Princeps of Wroclaw, most commonly called Stiles by his peers and those who knew him well, had been, during his short tenure as a debutant, a diamond of the ton, more for the connections he brought with him than his temperament - even though he was beautiful, and considered the peak of male omega perfection, slim-hipped, wide-shouldered, with long thighs, with large expressive eyes of a particular shade of golden brown and a soft mouth like a smudge of paint.

Peter had seen the prince grow up and couldn't get past the image of a knock-kneed urchin with missing front teeth and his hair cropped to his head. He was still dressed like that urchin wearing clothes that almost certainly had at least one creature secreted upon himself. "Hullo, Peter," he said as Peter slid open the sash, Peter did not open it too wide in case the prince tried to climb inside. It would not have occurred to him to come in through the door if a window was right there. "I heard you got a cat."

There were many things that Peter might have expected the prince to say, hullo Peter, I heard you got married, hullo, Peter, I was hurt I was not invited to your wedding when I live just next door, hullo, Peter, dear god those scars just aren't improving but predicting the prince was like foretelling the weather using knucklebones, generally not worth the effort. His mind flitted about like a hummingbird and he liked animals much more than people, the only exception being his alpha who Peter knew he liked immensely. Their bedroom windows were so close after all.

"Stiles," Peter said in one of his most patient tones as the prince reached in and took his freshly honeyed slice of toast, "what is that?"

"It's toast," Stiles answered wondering if this was a trick question. He wore all of his emotions on his face so openly that he should have been easy to read.

"Not my breakfast," Peter said, "that," he pointed to the strange animal that was tethered to the prince by a length of red rope. It looked like the strange offspring of a cameleopard and a sheep, brightly rust coloured, Peter would hazard a guess at wool, covered the animal which was currently chewing away happily at his mother's prized buddleia plants.

"Oh, Chamberlain," Stiles said as if forgetting to introduce someone at a ball, "Peter, this is Chamberlain," Chamberlain clearly did not know the etiquette because he continued his floral breakfast unabated. Peter knew the prince well enough to leave it open for the prince to continue because he would, and he did. "Chamberlain is an alpaca, from South America," Peter remained silent, "London Zoo just had a lot shipped over and Chamberlain was unwell so they wanted him quarantined for a few days, I can't imagine you'd mind, do you Peter?"

Peter also knew when he had been ambushed into agreeing. He had been a military officer, after all. The prince might have been a great beauty but right now he looked like that impish boy rescuing baby birds from what he had mistakenly considered abandoned nests. The prince's mother had died when he was barely out of leading-strings and so his nurses and governesses and father had overlooked this nurturing instinct towards animals until the house was full of abandoned kittens. When he was married his father had decamped to Brighton, possibly to get away from the menagerie that had slowly taken over the mews and the stables. Now there was this foreign interloper in Peter's private garden eating his mother's buddleias. "Now about that cat?" He asked around a mouthful of toast and honey.

Peter took a deep breath before he answered. "Stiles," he said with all the patience he could muster before he finished his coffee, "I got married yesterday, my bride, Lydia, brought with her her cat, it stole the butter from the dinner table, terrorised poor Corey and vanished into the house, where it let Kali know it was alive by presenting her with a half-eaten mouse that was not quite dead. It is not a sociable animal." He paused, "are you sure your donkey in a sheepskin should be eating those, I'm not sure they're not poisonous."

The prince did, to his credit, check what the creature was eating before going, "butterfly bushes are fine, Absalom ate one of those last year and he was fine." Peter had no idea which of the beasts was Absolom but the camel wearing a fleece to protect it from the British cold monstrosity was clearly fine for it lifted its tail and shat all over the pristine paving stones without regard of the nobility of its companions. It didn't stop eating either. "I should be getting him back to the mews," he said, "tell your new wife she's welcome to tea on Friday." Peter promised that he would and added the mental addendum to warn her not to eat the sandwiches.

With a cheeky grin that better suited a ten year old urchin than a diamond of the first water, the prince pulled the creature away from the bush with its bright red leash attached to its bridle and bit, a bush which was now a lot barer than it had started the day, and through the gate to the rear yard the very end of led to the mews and stables which also meant taking the bizarre beast through the vegetable garden.

Peter sighed and pushed away his toast. He had lost his appetite for the day. He had probably also lost all of the leafy salad greens that had been in the garden.

\----

Peter met his new wife in his office where she tried to take more time off his life than the prince had because she stood with one foot on the mantle and the other on the back of the escritoire as she tried to take down the heavy drapes with one hand and the other steadying herself on the shutters.

"Saint Bartholomew's skin woman!" he exclaimed moving forward and reaching up to put his hands around her waist and lift her down, "what are you doing?"

"These drapes are filthy," she said looking up at him, and had the gall to look annoyed that he had stopped her falling to her death from her precarious perch.

"Lydia," he said leaning over her in the hope it might get her to actually listen, "you are a Marchioness, if you want the drapes taken down you do this!" For a whole moment he considered yelling for Kali but he supposed it was good not to antagonise the butler when he had plans to play battledore with her later, "Corey! Zachary! Joshua!"

The three footmen nearly fell over themselves reacting to the bellow, and to be the first in through the door, well Zach and Josh did, Corey was probably there, he had the rare ability to vanish into the wallpaper. He was at the back holding the cat which appeared to have dug its claws into his fine wool coat and wasn't letting go. "Her ladyship would like the drapes to be laundered, take them down and have them washed and pressed." Two of them then scuttled off to find a stepladder whilst Corey looked around and was still holding the cat, or the cat was holding him and he was preventing damage to his coat with his hands under his legs. "I'll get the um," he said and then vanished into the hallway in another direction. Corey might have been one of the more generic footmen, he pulled his weight but didn't have a specific job like Josh, who was Peter's valet, but it looked like he might have just become the full time cat wrangler.

The cat did need a lot of wrangling.

Knickers had started yowling late at night and between him and Willoughby's squeaky wheels it was a wonder Peter had gotten any sleep. Yet Lydia seemed fond of the creature so he couldn't just pass it off to the prince. Although it did remain an option.

"I didn't see the point," Lydia said with a sweet smile that was entirely mocking, "I was perfectly capable of getting it down myself."

"You were also perfectly capable of asking for a step ladder, not pretending to be some sort of African ape and climbing on the furniture." She laughed and it was a delightful sight, well it would have been if he hadn't been so startled. Since his accident Peter's nerves were not what they used to be. 

"An ape wouldn't need a step ladder," she said and then with that same playful smile that did things to him, things he wasn't ready to admit or face outside the privacy of his bath, she continued, "and it would probably maul the footmen."

"But then the ape would have to look after his own cat."

Her resulting spray of laughter was a joy to behold. Lydia was beautiful and she was clever and she was in his office laughing and it made Peter feel more monstrous than ever, that perhaps he was the ape dragged kicking and screaming in a cage back from the African subcontinent, and after a brief stay with the Prince, who was well-meaning but ignorant in the nature of animals - wild animals did not want to be pets, no matter how amenable they seemed to the idea when they were denied escape - had been passed off as a member of the nobility. He tried to curl in on himself but she was still laughing, and laughing with him, and not at him 

_"How can I be expected to lie with that?_ "

"Come with me," he said and took her by the hand, gently unthinking that it was the scarred hand, the one that didn't have sensation all the way around and the one he kept gloved, even in the house. "This will be far more interesting than trying to swing from the drapery."

He walked her down the corridor as she babbled about the ugly drapes and how they were completely the wrong fabric for that room, where she was trying to talk around the fact she was going to try and make them into a riding habit, because Peter wasn't stupid and she had shown her hand a little early to try and deny it now, but when he unlocked the door and opened it she took a little gasp.

Peter didn't use the library. He had no need to. He had been abroad for several years and before then if he wanted a book he either asked if they had it, where it was put into his hand, or if they did not he ordered it where several days later it was put into his hand. His father had liked the idea of libraries much more than the actuality of them. He liked the idea that people might visit him in there and he would seem erudite and learned but he didn't actually like to read and would sit on the heavily cushioned chairs with his pipe and a glass of scotch and fall asleep in front of the fire with his book a few pages open on his lap.

It was not the most well-endowed library in London but its shelves were full, there was a reading table, a desk and the other sundry furnitures that Peter's father had thought were necessary including two leather club chairs set before the club fender on what might have been the biggest fireplace in the house. The shelves were no higher than waist height and fixed on every other panel of the walnut wainscoting but the rest was covered in portraits, of the family, some that they had picked up from artists and several beloved dogs, often shown with some game in their mouth like they had ever been taken hunting - one of his father's spaniels would have had conniptions if his feet had the misfortune of getting wet - and there were miniature statues sent back from Peter's tour of Europe before the war.

The vast majority of the family's books were in the grand library in Westfall, sent there when the bookshelves here had gotten full with the romances his mother had favoured, the more salacious and horrific the better, but this was a room his parents had used, and after their death and his own disfigurement Peter had kept it locked away. He was now offering it to her; if only to preserve his nerves.

"I want to make clear that you are not a prisoner here," he said, falling into the shadows behind her so that she would not have to look at his scars, "you may come and go as you please, but if you choose to remain inside you do not have to stick by my side, the house has only recently been reopened but it does have its particular charms."

Lydia pushed past him to lean over a giant atlas spread on the reading table, ignorant or ignoring the poor light where the shutters were still latched over the windows, turning pages. "Thank you," she said but did not look up from the pages, tracing her finger along with some notation on the page. "This will make a charming workroom."

Of course, it could not be so simple, he thought to himself. He was going to have to explain, again, that she was a marchioness, she did not need to work ergo she did not need a workroom. She moved to a shelf full of women's magazines, pulling one out at random and flicking through the fashion plates and patterns. "Do you not have things to do?" she asked, "I assumed you wanted me out of your office for a reason."

"I," he started.

"Is this a Boticelli?" she asked, turning and cutting off any answer he might have given her, "I have only seen his work in copperplate prints," she took a stumbling step back into what had been his father's chair and her face was full of awe he had never expected to see on her.

The painting was of a woman not entirely unlike Lydia, wearing a white gown with a gold cord around her neck and red ribbon woven through her hair. The plaque called her a noblewoman but family tradition called her Simonetta Vespucci and Peter had never really given her much thought. Her portrait had been to the left of the large panes of the mirror over the fire for his entire life. The woman in the painting was pale with the same golden-red hair, caught in tiny braids and curls with strings of pearls and red ribbons and a feather, with a swan-like neck and a blue-black cameo pendant in the dip of her throat.

"I heard," Peter said stepping up to stand behind her chair, "that the painter asked to be buried at the feet of the woman in the painting, he painted her over and over. My grandfather won that painting in a wager."

"I never expected to find something so lovely," she said in a quiet breath as if speaking louder would break the spell cast upon her by the painting.

"I know," Peter said but he was not looking at the portrait as he said it.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite his best intentions Peter makes a friend and suffers a Thursday whilst being of the opinion that nothing good ever happens on a Thursday

Peter's second attempt at a wedding night went mildly better than the first. He reached the bed and was able to sit on the edge when he reached across the coverlet and his fingers found the launcher for a furry missile that yowled and launched itself at his face claws first. This was accompanied by Lydia scolding "Knickers" and Peter throwing himself back towards the wall and leaving the room in search of ointment for the scratches on his forearms where he had thrown them up. He then went for his evening walk.

The third night had followed an exhausting game of battledore with Kali and with the stresses of the week, he had climbed from his bath, pulled on a shirt and fell asleep on the bed. He awoke in the very early hours having missed dinner but finding someone had sent him up a tray of buttered bread and cold meats and cheese which he picked at. Following the accident on the continent, his appetite had been patchy at best. He dressed without waking Josh and went for his evening walk letting Donovan, the night footman, know that he was doing so. He only returned after Kali had woken and roused the house for the day, having sat upon a high wall and watched the nearby market place come to life before returning to the house.

The third night was a Thursday and being solidly of the opinion that nothing good ever started on a Thursday he informed Lydia that he would not be visiting her that night as it would do her good to get a good night's sleep before tea with the prince the next day.

Despite his own best intentions, he found himself unable to sleep and made the decision, just past midnight, to go for a walk. It was becoming part of his evening routine.

He had just stepped out through the side gate, closing it behind him when a voice called out, "I knew it was you." Surprised as he was at this he looked around to find the owner but could find nothing at eye level. It took him a moment to realise there was a young boy, perhaps of twelve or so years, sat on the garden wall which was about six foot tall, so that his knees were at a level with Peter's eye.

"What was me?" Peter asked the pair of knees. With the high leather collar of his range coat and battered tricorn, he couldn't really tilt his head up too high so he made the decision that the pair of legs would do as something to talk to.

"That you're the Monster of Mayfair."

Peter rolled his eye. "I'm sure it hasn't escaped your knowledge that this is Knightsbridge." He was sure that he was the aforementioned monster but he had lived his life in Knightsbridge, Mayfair was full of tradespeople and bawdy houses that passed themselves off as beta women's boarding houses.

"Yeah but the monster of Knightsbridge doesn't track as well," the legs said. With that said he jumped down and revealed himself to be a short youth, perhaps only five foot tall, with dirty blonde hair and despite being out in the streets of London in the early hours, he was well dressed in a clean shirt, pants and velvet jacket. He even had a small pair of Hessian boots. He was dressed like he belonged in Knightsbridge but it didn't address the two questions that Peter had.

"Shouldn't you be in bed?" he asked the boy.

"My nurse falls asleep at nine o clock, as long as I'm back in bed by the time she wakes up it doesn't matter, Mama is at a party with her husband, she's married to Dr Geier, do you know him, he looks after the queen, so there's no one to notice that I should be in bed, but there's far too much to do." The boy was, if nothing else, cocky.

"If your stepfather is so rich why are you not at school?"

"Oh I was," the boy continued unabashed, "but Flash Harry showed up for class with the pox of all things, they've rusticated us until the Autumn to make sure that it doesn't spread." 

"Flash Harry?" Peter was sure there was a track to the conversation but he wasn't following it.

"Harry Flashman, he's one of the seniors," and with the opening, the boy continued talking and when Peter made the decision to walk away from him the boy fell into step telling him all about the older boy who had a bit of a reputation as a bully and had narrowly avoided expulsion for drinking by coming down with some variant of the pox. For all the information that the boy had given about himself, he had not bothered to introduce himself or be introduced to Peter.

Peter walked alongside him to the edge of Golden Square before he addressed the boy. "Who are you?" he asked and his tone carried the implied question and why should I care?

"I'm Liam," the boy said with a smile full of teeth still too big for his head, "Liam Dunbar, Viscount Tewkesbury," he wiped his hand on his velvet jacket before thrusting it out to Peter, "a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"Charmed," Peter drawled.

"And I was thinking," the boy started.

"No," Peter said.

"You haven't heard me out yet," the boy, Liam protested. 

"You should be in bed." Peter felt that he should mention that, most people were in bed. Society wasn't but the rules didn't really apply to them. He was sure a child of this boy's age, he had already forgotten the boy's name, should definitely be tucked up in bed.

"Probably," Liam said with a beaming smile, "but as I said I was thinking."

"A terribly dangerous past time," Peter said trying to walk away and finding the boy kept pace with him. 

"That you being the Monster of Mayfair," Liam continued looking up at Peter.

"So you say, despite this being Knightsbridge."

"You seem a little hung up on that," Liam said, "but despite that, I think I could..."

"No," Peter cut him off, he didn't want to know what the boy planned. It was Thursday, it didn't bode well that this was happening to him on a Thursday.

"Be your assistant," Liam finished with a beaming grin.

Peter supposed that that was better than turning him in for a reward. Peter would have turned him in for the reward. 

"I could be the Knave of Knightsbridge." 

The boy looked so earnest that Peter had to admit he rather enjoyed taking the wind from his sails. "Or the idiot of Islington. The Pink of Pimlico. The Wally of Westminster perhaps."

"The Hero of Hackney." Liam said, "I have this." He reached into his velvet jacket and pulled out a strange forked stick with what looked like a strap attached to the ends, then he took something else from his pocket, fixed it into the strap and pulled it back and released the second thing as a projectile where it struck a previously unseen flower pot with a loud crash.

"Shit," Peter said because it was Thursday and nothing good ever happened on a Thursday and it happening to him just meant it was a hundred times worse. "Run for it." 

There was a clamour as the house came to life, lamps flickering to life and doors slamming, Peter didn't stick around to find out what came next but he knew that the Monster of Mayfair would be in the scandal sheets again tomorrow.

  
When they stopped running Liam did not have the good sense to look anything other than elated. "That was brilliant." He didn't even look winded. In fact, he looked as fresh as a daisy. Peter hated him for that. He felt exhausted but the boy was not wearing a heavy leather overcoat despite the weather. "I can see why you do this, I thought you were just bullying the villains of London but..."

"I'm trying to take a walk," Peter said, "I like to walk before I go to bed, that's all I'm doing."

Liam clearly didn't believe him. "I saw you, in the park, with the Lady, you were attacked and defended yourself and it was brilliant." 

Well, Peter thought, at least the boy had the truth of it. "And then with the fruit seller, I tried to tell them but they didn't listen, and I thought, I could help, I could prowl the streets of London with you and..."

"You could go home." Peter offered. He might have ended most of his friendships when he went to the continent but he had no intention of befriending this child. He could understand why the child wasn't at school, but why he wasn't tucked up asleep in his nursery was another matter. Peter hadn't liked children when he was one, and although he hoped the prince would sire some offspring soon, it was more because he didn't want to wake up to an African Elephant or cameleopard at his bedroom window when Josh opened the shutters. Even his plan to have a child with Lydia was based entirely on inheritance and not on any paternal urge. His cousin was a waste of time and Peter had responsibilities to Westfall and that included preventing cousin Eustace having anything to do with the estate.

Liam would have been a better heir.

But so would the potted plant he had murdered.

Or the African Elephant.

"Why?" Liam asked, "Mama is visiting Lady Wetherby and won't be back until dawn at the earliest and then she'll be drunk, Nurse expects me to be in bed asleep but then I have to be quiet in the morning because mornings don't like Mama," Peter had been the victim of several unfriendly mornings himself so he could commiserate, "so it's better to sleep then, and Julian," he must have been referring to his step-father, "he looks after the queen so he's never home because everyone who's anyone wants him to treat their minor ailments because he treats the queen, so I might as well go be your assistant."

"I don't need an assistant," Peter told him, "because I'm not trying to be the Monster of Mayfair, I'm just really unlucky."

"You have a costume," Liam continued, "you're like the Scarlet Pimpernel."

Peter let out a gusting sigh, the next time he saw Emma Orczy he was going to cut her publically.

"That's a book, it's not real," Peter said, "I don't put on a costume and save French nobles from the Guillotine, I just like a walk before bed."

"But the coat, the hat," Liam said.

Peter unbuttoned the collar of his coat, letting it fall down over his shoulders and showing the boy the scars, "I walk at night because then no one can see me," he had expected the boy to recoil in horror. Liam seemed nonplussed, Peter assumed it was the poor light. It was night and they were stood between two of the street lamps. "I'm not the Monster of Mayhem, heroes like Blakeney don't exist outside fiction."

"How did you get your scars?" He asked and then remembered his manners, "if you don't mind me asking."

"I was on the continent," Peter told him, "stood at a desk under an oil lamp when a rocket came through the window, it was an accident, the rocket hit the lamp and everything went up in flame, including me."

"Wow," Liam said, "you were really lucky to survive." That seemed like a vast understatement, "Julian wants me to learn to be a doctor like him, but I'm a viscount, so I have money, or I'll have money when I come to my majority, and I don't need to but a lot of what he does is really exciting and," he looked at Peter, "do you think he could help, he is a very good doctor and burns hurt something fierce, even after."

"I have seen many doctors," it was a lovely gesture but very misplaced, "I might even have seen your step-father, there has been so many I don't remember their names."

"That's fair," Liam said, "I still don't think I want to be a doctor. I think I'd like to help people."

"You can do more as a viscount than a doctor," Peter found himself saying, "real change can be made in the House of Lords."

"Papa never went to the House of Lords," Liam said as they walked along, "what is it like? He died when I was small and I don't really remember him well but I remember Mama saying he should go to the House of Lords."

Peter, glad to have changed the conversation from his accident, told him. He spent over an hour walking with the boy talking about noblesse oblige and how Liam owed a responsibility to his ancestral lands and the people there, that he had to make sure that they were taken care of so that they could take care of him, that it was a system of mutual benefit but that many people exploited it and those were the lowest of people and it was no wonder that people like Derek Hale, no relation, could buy up their debts for pennies on the pound and make a fortune selling their property. If they couldn't look after their estates they deserved to lose them.

By the time they had come full circle, Peter had, unwillingly, made a friend and Liam understood more about politics than he had ever learned at school.

The next morning the scandal sheets spoke of how the Monster of Mayfair was seen abroad kidnapping a child - because of course, it did, Peter thought, chewing on his toast mechanically - because why else would the so-called Monster be abroad, let alone walking with the Viscount Tewkesbury.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay this whole scene was planned around the Scarlet Pimpernel because I got my dates wrong, it says in my notes that it was published in 1804, it wasn't, it was in 1904, so Liam couldn't have read it, I know, I know, I'm usually really good about these things but it was either that or Vathek and well I don't wanna reread Vathek.


	13. Chapter 13

Lydia had not slept well despite Peter having told her that she would need her rest to meet the prince for tea. She had expected a furore of fuss and splendour with odd rules and fabulous clothes with rules of etiquette she felt that she would not know and would be shamed for. She was aware of most of the rules of society, having been raised as a vicar's daughter, and spent years listening to society gossip, for seamstresses were considered deaf and stupid and obviously did not hear what was discussed above their heads, and the girls in the workroom had shared such gossip and scandal because they had been expected to be invisible as well as discreet.

None of that prepared her to meet a Russian prince so when she was presented with a much heartier breakfast than she usually ate she began to wonder if the household knew something she didn't. There was thick white bread slathered with cream and honey, coddled duck eggs with a delicious spiced sausage on a bed of fried tomatoes and mushrooms and rashers of bacon on the side. A large pot of tea was also served to wash it all down. The Salamander, the elusive cook who ran the downstairs of the house that even Kali, the butler, wouldn't cross, had sent a simple note that just read "don't eat the sandwiches".

Having dressed and washed Lydia was put in a clean shift with her most comfortable stays and instead of the fine gown she expected she was dressed in a wool bodice and quilted wool skirts that were warm and perfunctory with the shoes she had worn in Dona Calaveras and a pair of bright green wool stockings that were thick enough that she could pinch the fabric between finger and thumb to feel a pleasant squeeze. 

Had she known about the stockings Lydia might not have been so reticent in marrying Peter.

As her hair was brushed and dressed in a simple braid twisted into a knot at the back of her head and pinned carefully with a few loose strands about her face and her face clean-scrubbed, with cold cream applied. As scent was dabbed unto her temples and the well of her throat Tracy leaned in and said: "don't eat the sandwiches."

As that was the second warning Lydia had received about the mysterious sandwiches and was now intrigued.

She spent the late morning, waiting for the late afternoon when it was appropriate to call for tea, making a shirt for Peter who just frowned at her whenever he looked up from his ledgers. He had explained that in his time on the continent his managers had left his accounts a mess that he was trying to sort. This left him hunched over his escritoire with a pen in his hand that he sometimes gnawed on the end of, it was a shaped piece of wood that had been lacquered and could be set with different metal nibs. Kali supplied him with cups of a hot drink, which she changed at set intervals. Zachary would light the lamps and draw the shutters closed and had, the previous evening at least, lit a fire in the grate for the night had a late spring chill and someone had mentioned how Lydia despised the cold.

Peter was unhappy with Lydia at any kind of industry, as opposed to something frivolous, but other than frowning and making a displeased grunt of breath through his nose he said nothing.

At half-past two, according to the mantel clock, Lydia stood up and shook out her skirts, folding her work neatly and putting it in a basket she had found to hold her sewing, and the sewing box that the household had found for her, and placed them in the little area beside the fire that she had taken over as her own, complete with a couch that she could pull her feet up unto as she worked. "Going to tea with the prince?" Peter asked her, he rubbed at the bridge of his nose as if staring at the numbers were giving him a headache.

"Yes," she said, "I'm not sure I'm dressed for it, though."

He looked her up and down, his gaze lingering on the swell of her bosom and the neat cap she wore over her hair against her throat. "You look well," he said, "a word of advice," he said, "don't eat the sandwiches."

At the door where Kali held a bonnet for her she repeated "don't eat the sandwiches" and offered her a basket which was full of sugary fancies, "do you want a chaperone to accompany you to the door, my lady?"

As the house stood kitty-corner to their own and there was perhaps five hundred paces between the two doors Lydia assured Kali that she was fine.

Lydia knocked on the door and was surprised that she didn't look as nervous as she felt. After a volley of loud barking and an eee-eee noise the door opened and a young male omega with the most remarkable eyes she had ever seen stood there, and at his feet was a wire-haired terrier losing his mind trying to jump despite the contraption attached to him which was the source of the awful screeching. "You must be Lydia," the vidame said taking the basket, "Willoughby, get down!" he turned to the dog without a pause, "come in, come in," then another "Willoughby!" He beamed at Lydia, "he loves people," 

The house was built the same as Westfall house but the room that Peter used as a library had been converted into a large sitting room with wooden benches with quilts draped over them. Some of them had been repurposed from quilted skirts, like the one Lydia wore. There were cats everywhere and Lydia started to suspect the warning about the sandwiches was about cat hair.

The sitting room was kept immaculately clean, despite the cats, which Lydia counted at - including the large wicker basket by the fire which was full of kittens that hadn't quite managed to get free yet - twelve. The dog was jumping at Lydia's skirts looking for affectionate head rubs and affirmations of his good behaviour. The prince, who was yet to introduce himself handed off the basket to a footman, or what would have been a footman in Westfall House, and sat on a padded couch in front of a fire which was cleverly screened with a fine bronze mesh, and lifted the dog, contraption and all, up to his lap where the dog tried to slither across to Lydia. "I am sure we will be the best of friends," the prince continued and carried on talking, explaining that he had known Peter all of his life and was glad he had someone in his life to take care of him because he did not do so himself, and Kali needed help in that regard.

A female servant in sturdy broadcloth came in with an occasional table on wheels which had a chocolate pot and a plate of sandwiches, catching Lydia's eye she gave her a minute shake of the head as a warning, there was also a plate of the sugary fancies that Lydia had brought. "You're here first," the prince said leaning forward to pour the chocolate into the cups and handed one to Lydia without asking her if she wanted one, "Isaac and the others will be here later, I'm expecting them at any moment, I'm sure you'll fit right in, have a sandwich."

Unable to think of a polite way to refuse, whilst simultaneously burning with curiosity because everyone had warned her not to eat them, she took it and took a small bite. She expected cat hair. She had been dressed for cat hair. Cat hair turned out to be the least of it. It was revolting, salty with the strangest consistency she had ever had in her mouth, a sort of liquid woodiness with an after taste of ash that she immediately took a large swallow of the bitter chocolate to wash away. Whatever was in that sandwich it was awful and much worse than just cat hair. Cat hair she would have eaten.

"What do you think?" the prince asked her, beaming with his hands in Willoughby's fur in such a way that Lydia could not just pass the rest of the sandwich to the dog. "I made it myself," he continued, "it's _sham_." He looked incredibly proud of himself as she wondered what she had gotten herself into. "I don't eat meat, I do get some delivered for the cats, along with fish, but I just can't bring myself to, and people are always so pleased to see ham that I thought I might be able to recreate it. This is the closest I've got yet." The very idea that he had been working at this recipe for some time and this was the BEST effort filled Lydia with horror, but she couldn't tell him that it was inedible dreck, even when her own standards were impossibly low from having gone to bed hungry more than once in her life when he looked so proud and she didn't know him well enough that he might take her honesty as anything other than an insult.

"It's just like real ham," she said after she had managed to swallow. "I must take some back for Peter."

When the prince turned to the door to call for a waxed cloth that she might wrap a few of the sandwiches for her husband - which would immediately go into the fire possibly with spouts of oddly coloured flame - she tried to slip the sandwich to the dog who wisely refused it. She slipped the remainder into her pocket and was glad that it was small enough that he might believe she had eaten it as she slipped a candied date into her mouth to chew.

The Salamander had, in her basket, provided biscuits studded with raisins and sweetened with almond flour, individual spice cakes the size of a teacup bottom with thick buttercream smeared between layers. Fingers of almond cake with two layers glued together with raspberry jam and almond flakes drizzled on top - none of which was designed to insult the prince in regards to his inedible finger food. Lydia knew they were from the Salamander because they were all on plates with the same patterns as the one she was given for her supper. A large bonbon dish was also on the table and was what was full of candied dates. 

A young man joined them, swanning into the room and sitting down so heavily on one of the seats it gave out a loud exhale and creak as he sprawled, "I have had the worst day, oh, cake," and that was how Lydia met Isaac.

Isaac Lahey was an omega with the face of an angel in a velvet suit that was ragged at cuff and hem, with a yellowed collar, all of which struck Lydia as odd for omega were coddled dolls that were allowed such peccadilloes - like the prince had - with utmost luxury. Isaac's boots were well polished but the leather was scuffed and almost worn through. If his parents could not afford the upkeep of an unmarried omega then he should have had a sponsor but it was clear he did not. 

The way he stuffed his face with cake, boycotting the sandwiches and letting one of the larger kittens, or a small cat it was that size where it could have been either, climbed up his stockinged legs to sit on his lap and yowl at him. That cat, at least, had a favourite. He even continued talking before he even realised that Lydia was there. "I had to take a charabanc because there were no hansom cabs at Greenwich, when I complained to Dr Stephenson he told me to take the ferry, the ferry, Stiles."

That was when he realised that someone else was there, "Lydia," the prince, Stiles, said with a dip of the head, "this is Vidame Isaac Lahey," he said using the formal words of introduction, "Isaac, this is Lydia, Marchioness Westfall, she married Peter."

Isaac looked as impressed as a person could be with a mouthful of cake, "I didn't think Peter would marry," he said, "since he returned to England he's been a recluse. I don't think I've seen him since he left for the continent."

"When you were convinced that you would marry him if you could only have a season," Stiles said with a fond mockery.

"I never got a season, did I?" Isaac said, "and do not worry, Lydia, was it, I have no intentions towards your husband. Between my allowance from my brother and my work I am quite self-sufficient and do not need to ever marry."

Lydia knew there was a story there and she could not judge on how a person made their living, "oh, what is it that you do?" She expected he might answer that he was a tutor or a live-in nurse, what in a beta would be called a governess and certainly she had never heard of an omega in such a role but perhaps they could be spinsters too, although she would not have said that Isaac was any older than she herself was and far too young to be considered on the shelf.

"I set clocks," Isaac said, "once a week I go to Greenwich to set my watch to the official time and for a fee, I go to houses like this one," he looked around the house which was well kept if not as opulent as the one Lydia shared with Peter and felt much more like a home for it, "and make sure the clocks are set to Greenwich time."

"If you do not do Westfall house," Lydia said, "you must make room in your calendar and do not think to undercharge just because we are friends, I shall pay the going rate."

"I don't need charity," Isaac snapped.

"I don't offer charity, the house is full of clocks and although Kali is diligent in winding them there can be a ten minute time difference between the front of the house and the back and I doubt that it's that big," she said, "it is a service that you offer, and one we need if you have time to do it you would be paid like any other service person who comes to the house."

Isaac had the look of a renaissance statue of an angel, the sort that stood in the museum of London, or the Greek Gods that lounged in marble looking almost warm to the touch, with blonde curls, a clear forehead and long slim neck. He was tall and slim and looked like he might be waiting for some ancient hero to bring him a monster's head just for a look from those blue eyes in their direction. She was actually envious of his beauty and she had never felt envious of another in her life. There was even a moment where she wondered why Peter had not married this beauty instead of her when the omega had fancied himself in love with the man her husband had been.

There was something fragile and dangerous about Isaac as well, something that reminded Lydia of broken glass, glittering in the grass, beautiful but sharp.

She looked him up and down, "I might be overstepping but I have recently come into some lovely blue velvet," she said about the curtains that she had had taken down from the windows of Peter's sitting room which she had already replaced with much more practical wool even if the new drapes were yet to arrive, "I was going to make it into a riding habit for myself but with your colouring, it would make the most divine coat. I was looking for something to keep my hands busy, would you allow me to measure you for such a coat that I might make it."

"You can tailor an omega's jacket?" Stiles asked, delighted.

"I am sure that it will be the scandal of the season but Peter married a shop-girl, worse than that, a seamstress. I have been keeping myself employed since I was sixteen years old, and now the idea that I might have so much free time as a lady of society frightens me somewhat so despite his best intentions to the contrary," she smiled because Peter clearly didn't like her stitching, "we are coming to an accommodation about it, for he is offended that I do, but I would be honoured to make you a new coat, I can bring some designs around, but my embroidery is not fit to make you a new vest."

Isaac still looked hard-edged and annoyed by humanity. "My brother won't pay you."

"I don't need money, Peter keeps me," Lydia said, "I am well compensated in my marriage for my time." Then she realised how mercenary that sounded. "It can be my gift for you, well, your gift to me for letting me make it. I might even have enough of the velvet left for that riding habit."

"You must tell us all of the gossip," Stiles said with Willoughby stretched out on his lap chewing on what looked like a piece of antler, "we can be the scandalously married club, I was abducted, Lydia was in trade, Isaac you must get yourself invited to a castle with an alpha heir locked away by a wicked uncle so we can complete the set."

"Don't be silly," Isaac said pouring himself a cup of the chocolate, "who do we know that owns a castle."


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> from this point on we are definitely NSFW

Lydia returned from tea just as it was getting dark and the clock on the mantle read that it was nine-fifteen. She looked a little drunk but Peter was sure that it was nothing that a solid meal would solve. She came over and kissed him on the cheek, reassuring Peter that she was a little shot in the neck for the cheek she kissed was the melted one, and from her pocket, she pulled a small packet wrapped in waxed cloth. "I promised Stiles I would bring you some sandwiches," she said, unbuttoning her overcoat in a way that exposed a delicious expanse of breast. 

Peter was unsure where he had found the luck of finding such a woman, she was excellent at hiding her repulsion of his scarring, and he did genuinely enjoy her conversation, but her breasts were exquisite, pale and white and bulging against the front of her stays and she didn't mind if his eye lingered there, or even give a flirtatious false laugh and reach for a fichu, she didn't care she just continued as if he was looking her in the eye.

He wondered about the rest of her body, she had pale forearms like gathered swans, plump with promise and hands that were capable, just the previous afternoon he had watched her stitch and she had a serene expression on her face and he had had to adjust himself in his breeches.

She was his wife and she was available to him but he could not reveal himself to her because she would be horrified if she knew the extent of how monstrous he was, and so he didn't dare touch her outside of what they had agreed because in his head he still heard those words "how can I be expected to lie with that?"

His arrangement with Lydia was one of business. They had a contract and if he pressed for more he could break it. He could drive her away and no court would look at him and look at her and not take her side.

It had been years since he had touched a woman, not since Cadiz, and the flesh hungered and remembered softness and the taste of salt and soap and laughter. He didn't think there would ever be laughter in his bed with her. He looked too monstrous for laughter to be anything but mockery.

"You brought some of those abominations back?" Peter asked her referring to the sandwich.

"He has a new recipe," she said sitting on the couch with her Brunswick removed and starting to work on removing her shoes, "he calls it Sham."

Peter snorted at the pun, "there was ish, which was supposed to taste exactly like sardines, it didn't, and there were several other attempts and all of them were awful, quick, throw these into the fire and hope it doesn't flare green."

She had a low throaty laugh that caused her to cast her head back and show him the long line of her neck down to the shoulder of her ugly gown. He was struck by the desire to visit his solicitor and get some of his family jewels from where they were kept in trust and present them to her but then wondered what would look best against her skin. He wanted to give her his mother's amethysts, an urge he had never had with Vidama Blossom in all the time that they had courted.

"I doubt that the witchfinder general will come," she said, "he probably sees the billows of blue smoke and goes Vidame Hale is at it again, his cooking isn't witchcraft, it's demonic."

"And yet," he said turning around in his chair so that he could face her and the padded back of the chair was under his arm, "not one of us has the courage to tell him that we would rather eat river mud." 

"We know what is in river mud," she answered, unpinning her braid so it fell along the curve of her dress along her shoulder, golden and warm in the lamplight, "I do not know what he included that tasted so."

"I'm told it's vegetables, mostly." He offered her a grin, aware of how the sides of his face didn't match. "I do not begrudge him his decision not to eat meat, I just don't know why he's so intent to create a fake meat, there is nothing wrong with cheese and pickled beetroot."

"And you haven't told him that, either," Lydia countered, she was sticking out her stockinged foot and wiggled her toes in bright green wool and he wanted to tug off that stocking and rub his thumbs unto the meat of her foot. He was aware of his desire and the solid determination that he would visit her that night.

"I like his father," Peter told her, "and he might kill me if I made the boy cry."

"His father?" Lydia said stretching out the other leg to wiggle her toes which were freed from what looked like uncomfortable shoes. He was surprised how quickly she was at home in Westfall House, even if the only rooms she went into were the library, Peter's office and her own bed-chamber.

"The other prince, handsome alpha, military sort, cutting sense of humour, he's hilarious, truth be told, he should be having unleashed Stiles on the world, he moved to Brighton just after Stiles' first season, once he was married, I was in the continent at the time but we wrote to teach other. He was worried that the Emperor would call him out to join the Russian forces before he saw Stiles happily married, I didn't hear the end of it until I returned because of," he made a gesture around his face. "I've only been back these past two months but he is doing his best to catch me up on the gossip."

"I shall wonder then what you shall tell him of me," Lydia said with an arch smile.

"Of course, my dear, I shall tell you how you were born of sea foam when a pearl fell into the boiling waters of Greece and how seraph brought you robes of finest destiny into my chamber."

"You told him about the dress then," she looked amused, sprawled out on his favourite couch with her simple wool dress and green wool stockings that caught his attention more than the silk clocked stockings of society maidens, flashed for a momentary frisson in the gathered Alpha watching her as she adjusted her heavy skirts. Lydia had taken off uncomfortable shoes and was appreciating not having them on any more, a position he had taken himself more than once. Having decided that he was the one who would need to seduce her she wasn't trying hard any more - but she really didn't need to.

"That dress brought us together, I am currently negotiating with Dona Calavera for it that it might be sent that we might recreate our meeting yearly when we go out into society."

She gave off a bark of laughter, "for a moment," she said, "I believed you, but you're too much of a curmudgeon to go out in society."

"That dress could take the attention from my face," he had lazy self-deprecating humour, the sort that had built up over years of knowing he was the best-looking person in the room, and quite probably the smartest. He could insult himself because everyone around him would reassure him that it wasn't true - or it hadn't been.

"I would have to resize it for you," she said, "use scraps to make a matching patch."

He had not expected when she had walked into his office in that awful gown that he might adore her, but she enjoyed their verbal sparring as much as he did. He had tried to objectify her, to see her only as a way to prevent cousin Eustace, an idiot who Peter was not going to allow inherit Westfall if he could avoid it, by creating an heir. She was to be a means to an end. It did not matter that she was attractive, he had not even noticed at first he told himself - he certainly had even with the hideous dress - or that he had taken himself in hand more in their marriage than he had in the time since he was burned.

"I trust your beadwork," he said, and finally opened the wrapped bundle, there were two sandwiches which he pushed aside but also some of Mrs Perkins delightful lemon cakes which he had told Lydia he liked and was caught with the dilemma that his supper would be almost ready and the cakes were fresh and there. He wanted to smash them into his mouth like a small child with a stolen cake, but he was also an adult and didn't need to. "Thank you for the cake," he said because he did have manners.

"Mrs Perkins told me they were your favourite when she brought them in," she said, "I have eaten far too much," she said, getting to her feet, "I am going to get out of my stays, unless you object."

Peter, with the combination of his favourite lemon cakes, a conversation he was genuinely enjoying, and the idea of Lydia without her stays suddenly found it hard to think. "I can't imagine why I would," he said with a leer which made her laugh, and she placed another kiss on his temple as she left the room.

\----

Lydia had her supper sent to her room so Peter ate alone, saving the lemon cakes until after his main course but before dessert was served because he was not as fond of mint mousse although he did like it. The Salamander never served food that Peter didn't like but he liked lemon cakes better. He had a cursory wash and decided to visit Lydia. He had not thought her to be foxed when they had spoken, nearly three hours before, and although a glass of wine had been served with supper she had not requested more so he was sure that she was not intoxicated.

He had not, even if Kali had suggested it after applying a honey plaster thick with arnica to the bruises on his shins, attempted the journey to her bed in light in preparation of doing it in the dark. He was sure he had his path now, and she did do her best to make sure all of her stray furniture was tucked away. He knocked before entering because he didn't want to surprise her and managed to get to the bed and did a loose sweep with his arm to check for the cat, not wanting a repeat of the thing launching itself at him. His pride was all that was hurt apart from a few scratches on his forearms. Lydia had left the embers in the fireplace giving a very faint warm light but it only really outlined the furniture and was not quite enough to show his scars.

He could see where she lay in the bed as a slightly raised lump with a shadow of darkness around her face on the pillow but there was not enough light that he could make out much, but he knew that when his eyes accustomed more he would be able to make out more, but even so, there was no way she could, with his right side away from the light, see his scars.

He reached across the quilt and with light fingers found the edge and tugged it down as she gave a light gasp, possibly surprised how well this was going, he hadn't damn near broken his shin on the linen chest or been blinded by a screaming feline projectile.

With the quilt pulled back against his waist he stretched out his fingers again. Saliva pooled in his mouth with anticipation and his cock veritably ached in his pants. His fingers stretched out, he wondered if he would find her linen shift, warm from her skin, the soft pillow of her stomach or - dare he hopes - a breast. 

He found another quilt.

He peeled it back and found another quilt.

"I feel the cold," Lydia mumbled almost apologetically as he pulled back the fourth.

"Any more?" he asked softly.

"No," she said, "that's the last of them." 

He had to swallow the saliva because there was nothing between him and her nakedness but a linen shift, white linen against pale skin and warmed by her body. When he reached out this time he found the line of her rib and gently caressed it, dragging his hand down to the curve of her hip. 

The popular fashions of beta and omega created a false shape, stays created a line around the ribs, pushing the breasts up and apart, the line of the shoulder made the expanse of decolletage look bigger, and padding around the hips made the waist look smaller and the ass look bigger. It was a series of careful illusions made of fabric and reed boning. The body was not restrained as much as sculpted. Even the most restrained gown primped and preened the body underneath it. 

From what he could see in the poor orange light she was a goddess. 

Carefully, lightly, barely touching her, because if he was not careful he would spend in his pants, he pushed her shift up away from her thighs. This wasn't an assignation where he could take his pleasure from touching her - this was part of their business agreement.

But she was a virgin. She didn't know what her body was capable of and she was going to be afraid. He had to make this as easy and painless for her as possible. 

The agreement meant that he would visit her nightly until her pregnancy was confirmed, and looking at her he didn't think he would have a problem maintaining interest for her, so he wanted her to enjoy what they did. He didn't want her to fear or resent his visits, even if they were perfunctory.

He ran his hand the length of her thigh, the scarred hand still wearing its lace glove and heard a gasp as she reacted to the feel of his skin on hers, a quick gasp of surprise. He wondered if his hands were cold. He didn't measure temperature as well on his right side after the accident. He gave her a moment but wondered how long he could be this calm because his ardour was at a peak, the very concept of being able to touch someone intimately and to spend inside someone was almost enough to drive him mad with desire. That that someone was Lydia was almost more than he could bear.

His fingers found her sex and her thighs artlessly flopped open, as if she had been holding them tight waiting for him to touch her there. He was as gentle as he could be, cupping her sex and waiting until the tension that she held in her stomach eased and he began to stroke the lips there, not dipping his fingers in. 

She was as hairless as an omega but that did not confirm that she was one, many beta women used hot wax to remove the hair and she might be one of them. He had long since made the decision to treat her like a beta and not knot her, just in case. The idea of burying his knot inside her was enough to cause his mind to white out and make it hard to think but he didn't want to hurt her and knotting a virgin beta would hurt her greatly. An omega had a _poche_ to accept a knot - a beta did not. They could train their body to accept a knot with pleasure, but not without such protection.

He gave her plenty of time to react to his touch, long moments where he could feel the wetness of her arousal and he watched his fingers massage the outer lips of her sex, the flex and softness and he swallowed again.

She shifted against his hand and the tips of his fingers, pressed together as they were, pressed inside. She was wet, slick and hot and the skin there was as soft as the inside of a petal and he made the decision to bring her to fruition before he did anything else. He would let her know the pleasure her body was capable of and with careful fingers he found where she was open and wet and the hard nub of her clit and circled it.

"Please," she gasped and when he looked at her her eyes were screwed shut tight and her lip was between her teeth. He jerked back, horrified that he had hurt her, he had pushed her too hard and she was suffering through it for him - she was begging him to stop.

He got to his feet, "I'm sorry," he stammered and left the room.


End file.
